Since 2022, American companies, consumers, and even the United Nations have used large language models — artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT that are trained to create text that reads like human-generated writing.
In a study published in the Cell Press journal Patterns, researchers reveal that AI is used in an average of 17% of analyzed corporate and governmental written content, from job posts to press releases, and this rate will likely continue to increase.
“This is the first comprehensive review of the use of AI-assisted writing across diverse sectors of society,” says corresponding author James Zou of Stanford University. “We were able to look at the adoption patterns across a variety of stakeholders and users, and all of them showed a very consistent increasing trend in the last 2 years.”
Large language models became widely available to the public in late 2022. Today, more than a billion people around the world use them regularly.
Zou and his team decided to use an AI detection program that they’d previously developed to investigate the adoption patterns of these AI tools across four different writing contexts: US consumer complaints, company press releases, UN press releases, and job postings. They collected text published between January 2022 and September 2024 from each of these domains and ran it through the program.
To start, the team analyzed more than 687,000 complaints submitted between 2022 and 2024 to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a US government agency responsible for protecting consumers from banks and other financial companies. They found that about 18% of these complaints were likely written by AI.
For the corporate news releases, the researchers analyzed text published in three major news release platforms in the US: Newswire, PRWeb, and PRNewswire. They found that since the launch of ChatGPT, nearly a quarter of releases on these sites were AI generated. In particular, science and technology releases had the highest AI use rate by the end of 2023.
For job postings, the researchers found that posts from large companies on LinkedIn were less likely to be written by AI. However, after investigating vacancy postings from smaller firms, they found that large language models likely assisted in about 10% of the posts.
The team also looked into UN press releases written in English. They found a significant increase in AI-assisted writing, from 3% in early 2023 to more than 13% by late 2024.
Overall, the researchers found that the portion of content flagged as written mainly by AI increased sharply from 1.5% before the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 to more than 15% by August 2023. After that, growth slowed down, and the AI adoption rate was about 17% by August 2024.
“These estimates likely reflect a lower bound of the actual adoption rates,” Zou says. The detector they used cannot accurately differentiate texts that are heavily edited by humans, he notes.
Zou also says that the AI detection tool works best with a large collection of text. It would not be able to pinpoint whether a single article used AI.
“I do expect that in the future, the adoption rates will continue to increase but probably not as rapidly as those in the first year,” Zou says.
“Like all new technologies, it’s difficult to say if these AI models are simply ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ They still make mistakes, so if people completely outsource their job to these tools and don’t bother to check the accuracy, that could lead to errors in their writing.”
