Analyzing the News: The AI sell-off

Thirteen outlets covered this week's sell-off in AI stocks. Fíor could score ten of them, and read three as AI.

Fíor is a natural language classifier that predicts whether a piece of text was more likely written by a person or by AI.

Shares in AI companies fell hard this week as investors questioned the debt being used to build AI data centres. On Friday the Nasdaq fell 2.1%, closing out its worst week since June. The S&P 500 lost 1.1%.

CoreWeave, which rents out AI computing power, became the centre of it. Its shares fell almost 12% on Friday and about a quarter over the week. Yields on its bonds rose to around 15%, a level usually associated with companies in trouble. Higher oil prices and the prospect of higher interest rates added to the pressure. In Asia, South Korea's main index fell more than 8% in a single day.

The outlets were Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, CNBC, CBS News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Fortune, the Guardian, Business Insider, Barron's and the Motley Fool. Three are left out of the count. For Business Insider and Barron's, Fíor picked up page furniture and a redirect notice rather than the articles. The Motley Fool is an investment-advice site rather than a news outlet. AP, Bloomberg and CNN were scanned through republished copies. The MarketWatch scan caught some site navigation alongside the article. The Guardian, Fortune and MarketWatch pieces ran earlier in the week, before Friday's close.

The result

Seven read as human: Reuters, CNBC, CBS News, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and MarketWatch.

Three read as AI: AP, CNN and the Guardian.

Ten is the smallest sample this series works with, so treat this as an observation rather than a finding.

Four stories in, some outlets keep landing the same way. Reuters and CNBC have read as human every time, across the IMF forecast, US inflation, Meta's open model and now this. The Guardian has read as AI in all three pieces where it ran its own reporting. AP has read as AI in two of the last three.

Four stories is not enough to call any of that a house pattern. Outlets move. AFP read as AI on the IMF forecast and as human on Meta.

The ones that read as AI

AP and CNN both ran end-of-day market reports. They covered everything at once: the indexes, the chip stocks, CoreWeave, oil and bond yields. The Guardian went wide in a different way, tracking the sell-off through Seoul and Tokyo and linking it to US inflation.

Breadth is the obvious explanation. It does not hold up on its own. Reuters, CNBC and CBS News also wrote day-wide market reports, and all three read as human.

The human side has its own pattern. Bloomberg, Fortune, MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal each picked one thread and followed it: investors split over CoreWeave, the case for its business, the bond market, the credit risk. Every one of them read as human.

That does not hold up on its own either. CNBC ran a live blog, about as far from a single thread as coverage gets, and it read as human too.

Why market coverage reads like this

A market report has a fixed shape. The closing numbers, the biggest movers, a line from an analyst, then oil and bond yields. Every newsroom gets the same numbers at the same moment, and the piece has to be out within the hour.

Some of these pieces may have had AI help, with a first draft, a rewrite of wire copy or a final polish. Or market coverage has become so formulaic that a reporter and a model would write it the same way. Fíor cannot tell those apart on its own.

The market spent the week asking whether AI will earn back what has been borrowed to build it. Three of the ten pieces explaining that worry to readers read as AI themselves.

What Fíor is

Fíor is a machine learning classifier, currently in beta and available as a browser extension. It gives a prediction, not a verdict. It cannot see who sat at the keyboard, and nothing here is a claim about any journalist or publication. Reading as AI and being written by AI are not the same thing.

Treat it as a signal, not proof, and check the pages you read yourself.

Try the browser extension at Fíor.

Analyzing the News is a series where we run one major story through Fíor and see what comes back.