  Journalists are among the many users of large language models (LLMs). To
better understand the journalist-AI interactions, we conduct a study of LLM
usage by two news agencies through browsing the WildChat dataset, identifying
candidate interactions, and verifying them by matching to online published
articles. Our analysis uncovers instances where journalists provide sensitive
material such as confidential correspondence with sources or articles from
other agencies to the LLM as stimuli and prompt it to generate articles, and
publish these machine-generated articles with limited intervention (median
output-publication ROUGE-L of 0.62). Based on our findings, we call for further
research into what constitutes responsible use of AI, and the establishment of
clear guidelines and best practices on using LLMs in a journalistic context.
