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Prevalence of AI use in the syndicated Dear Annie advice column

Quantify the prevalence of AI-generated content in the Dear Annie advice column across its multi-site syndication by collecting and analyzing archival content from the various newspapers that publish the column.

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Background

The authors identify AI-generated responses in the widely syndicated Dear Annie advice column and argue that such use risks undermining reader trust in personal guidance formats.

However, they were unable to scrape and aggregate the column across its numerous hosting sites, preventing a systematic assessment of AI use frequency. As a result, the overall prevalence of AI authorship in Dear Annie remains unmeasured.

References

We were unable to scrape the Dear Annie column to quantify AI use because its publication across many different websites made it difficult to access archival content.

— AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed (2510.18774 - Russell et al., 21 Oct 2025) in Section 3, Analyzing AI use in newspapers — Notable individual cases of AI use (footnote)