Artificial intelligence wrote an average of 17 per cent of analysed corporate and governmental content in 2024, with corporate press releases showing the highest adoption rates at nearly 25 per cent.
Stanford University researchers examined over 687,000 documents published between January 2022 and September 2024 across four writing contexts: consumer complaints, company press releases, UN press releases and job postings. The study published in the journal Patterns represents the first comprehensive analysis of AI writing adoption.
James Zou of Stanford University said: “This is the first comprehensive review of the use of AI-assisted writing across diverse sectors of society. 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 two years.”
The research found that AI-generated content increased sharply from 1.5 per cent before ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch to more than 15 per cent by August 2023. Growth then slowed, reaching 17 per cent by August 2024.
Corporate press releases showed the highest AI adoption rates across three major US platforms: Newswire, PRWeb and PRNewswire. Science and technology releases had the highest AI usage by the end of 2023.
Consumer complaints to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau showed 18 per cent likely written by AI. Job postings from large companies on LinkedIn were less likely to use AI, but smaller firms used large language models for approximately 10 per cent of vacancy posts.
UN press releases in English showed significant increases from three per cent in early 2023 to more than 13 per cent by late 2024.
Zou cautioned that the findings likely underestimate actual usage: “These estimates likely reflect a lower bound of the actual adoption rates.” The detection tool cannot accurately identify heavily human-edited AI text.
The researchers noted that whilst AI tools assist writing, complete outsourcing without accuracy checks could introduce errors into professional communications.
