Analyzing the News: The Fed holds rates

Twelve outlets covered the Federal Reserve holding interest rates. Fíor read two of them 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.

On 28 October, the Federal Reserve kept its main interest rate at 3.75% to 4%, a month after raising it for the first time since 2023. The vote was 10 to 2. Two policymakers, Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, wanted another quarter-point rise straight away. The Fed's statement said the economy was expanding at a strong pace and inflation remained elevated, and that the accumulation of more information would help it decide what to do next. Its next meeting is in December, a month after the midterm elections.

The statement itself runs to about 150 words. Most of the coverage was built around it.

The outlets were Reuters, AP, the Guardian, ABC News, the Washington Post, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, NPR, CNBC, Fox Business and Business Insider. That is two wire services, American broadcasters and newspapers, the business press and the Guardian. Business Insider's coverage was a live blog.

The BBC's article was left out. The record of its scan pointed to a ChatGPT conversation rather than the BBC's own page, which means the text may have passed through ChatGPT before Fíor read it. For a tool that tries to tell human writing from AI, that result cannot be trusted, whichever way it came out.

The result

Ten read as human: Reuters, AP, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, NPR, CNBC and Business Insider.

Two read as AI: ABC News and Fox Business.

Fox Business was a close call. It came down only just on the AI side, Brath marked it not confident, and its other label said it reads like a person wrote it. The Washington Post read as human, also not confidently. ABC News was the clear outlier, with Brath sure it was AI and unsure how it reads. None of the twelve drew a writing-habit flag.

This is the tenth story scanned with Brath, Fíor's new model. ABC News has now read as AI in its last two appearances, after Anthropic's IPO filing. The Guardian read as human, and has now read as AI in seven of the twelve stories where it ran its own reporting.

The explainers held up

In earlier stories, the articles most likely to read as AI were explainers. In the PHP security story, two of the four AI results were pieces telling readers what they needed to know.

Not this time. AP and NPR both explained what the decision means for mortgages, car loans and credit cards, and both read clearly as human. The pattern did not repeat, which is a useful reminder that a few stories are not enough to call it a rule.

Why central bank coverage reads like this

Fed coverage is one of the most predictable forms in journalism. The statement arrives at 2pm, the wording changes by a few phrases from the last one, and reporters compare the two, count the dissents and quote the chair. Every outlet had the same short text to work from.

What they did with it varied. The Guardian, ABC News, Fortune and Fox Business all led on the timing before the midterms. Two of those read as human and two as AI, so the angle does not explain the result either.

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

The Fed says the accumulation of more information will decide its next move. Ten stories into Brath, some patterns are forming: Euronews, CBS News and now ABC News keep reading as AI, and explainers sometimes do and sometimes do not. Fíor is in the same position as the Fed. It needs more information before it calls any of them.

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.