This year's Pulitzer Prizes saw a record number of winners disclose AI use

This year's Pulitzer Prizes saw a record number of winners disclose AI use

A record eight Pulitzer awardees disclosed using AI this year, including five winners and three finalists,Nieman Lab reports. Disclosures have been required since 2024. This year, entrants used AI tools and large language models more often, mainly to search large document sets faster.

TheWall Street Journalused an internal LLM to summarize thousands of public documents on Texas floods. TheMinnesota Star Tribuneused ChatGPT to translate a female shooter's diary written infaux Cyrillic, then had language experts check the results. TheAssociated Pressused an LLM to search tens of thousands of leaked documents on Chinese surveillance technology, and theNew York Timesused GPT-5 to check its manual classification of SEC crypto cases.

Pulitzer administratorMarjorie Millertold Nieman Lab that the news industry now accepts "AI is here to stay" and better understands where its use is appropriate and "when it might not, such as in writing and editing stories in any format that might be considered for a Pulitzer Prize." The disclosure rule will also cover book entries starting next year.

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