Analyzing the News: US inflation in September

Thirteen outlets covered the latest US inflation figures. Fíor read seven of them as AI and six as human.

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

US consumer prices rose 3.7% in the year to September, up from 3.4% in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on 14 October. Prices rose 0.6% in the month alone. Gasoline jumped 9.1% and accounted for more than half of that monthly rise. Core inflation, which leaves out food and energy, rose to 2.6%.

It was the last inflation report before the US midterm elections on 3 November. Traders raised their bets on an interest rate rise at the Federal Reserve's October meeting, and several outlets noted that prices are now rising faster than average pay.

The outlets were Reuters, AP, CNBC, CNN, NBC News, CBS News, USA Today, Yahoo Finance, The Hill, the BBC, the Guardian, Euronews and Al Jazeera. That is two wire services, four US broadcast newsrooms, three other US outlets, two British outlets, and outlets based in France and Qatar. The Reuters piece was scanned as republished by CNA. The Euronews piece credits AP in its byline.

The result

Seven read as AI: the Guardian, AP, Yahoo Finance, Euronews, The Hill, the BBC and CNN.

Six read as human: Reuters, CBS News, USA Today, Al Jazeera, CNBC and NBC News.

Every result was clear except one. CNN read as AI, but only narrowly.

Six of these outlets also appeared in the IMF forecast piece earlier this week. Five landed the same way both times. Reuters, CNBC and Al Jazeera read as human. The Guardian and Euronews read as AI. AP moved, from a narrow human result to a clear AI one. Two stories is far too few to call that a pattern.

The ones that read as human

Angle does not explain the split. CNBC and Reuters led on markets and the Fed, and read as human. So did Yahoo Finance and The Hill, and both read as AI.

USA Today, NBC News and CBS News went to household costs and pay, and read as human. CNN took the same angle and read as AI, if narrowly.

The wire services split too. Reuters read as human. AP read as AI, and so did Euronews, which built on AP's copy.

Three of the four US broadcast newsrooms read as human. Both British outlets read as AI. With two outlets on one side and four on the other, that says very little on its own.

Why inflation coverage reads like this

The inflation release is embargoed until 8:30 a.m. Eastern. At that moment every newsroom gets the same tables and the same summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and speed matters.

The release also supplies the key line: gasoline accounted for over half of the monthly increase. Most of the coverage repeated that framing.

Shared wording does not settle it. Reuters, CNBC, CBS News and NBC News carried the same line and still read as human.

Some of these pieces may have had AI help, with a first draft, a rewrite of wire copy or a final polish. Or data-release 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.

Inflation is the one economic figure people can check against their own receipts. Readers know when prices have gone up. Whether a person wrote the report telling them so is harder to see.

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.