Truth is focal to our goal as a newspaper: Every fact should be correct, every quote should be accurate and every byline should precisely reflect the writer behind the piece. For over a century, the Daily Trojan has been committed to highlighting the voices of USC’s student journalists — until recently, we never worried that those voices may not belong to students at all. 

The Spring 2026 semester has unfortunately seen an unprecedented number of articles submitted either with confirmed or suspected generative artificial intelligence usage — a strict violation of the Daily Trojan’s Code of Ethics.

The Daily Trojan’s prohibition of AI-generated writing is not rooted in fear of technology, but in the responsibilities of journalism itself. Reporting requires judgment, verification and accountability — qualities that cannot be outsourced to an algorithm trained on an insurmountable number of dubiously sourced materials.

When a student journalist interviews a celebrity like Chappell Roan, observes a three-hour Undergraduate Student Government debate or pores through University budget documents, they bring curiosity, empathy and care to the work. Generative AI can imitate tone, but it cannot replicate the integrity of the reporting process.

Every applicant to the paper must agree to abide by the Code of Ethics and, specifically, agree to not submit AI-generated writing. The policy, which has been around since roughly Fall 2022, has also been reaffirmed at required general and specific section staff orientations.

This semester alone, the Daily Trojan declined to publish four articles it had reason to believe were created using AI. As a result, the managing team has adopted new procedures to check every article for AI-generated writing — adding onto our already rigorous editing process, which includes two managing reads and three fact-checking reads. 

While this problem is worsening, it is not new. 

In Fall 2025, the Daily Trojan took two articles off its website that were published in its monthly Spanish Supplement, which the managing team determined were created using generative artificial intelligence. After the articles were removed, the Daily Trojan published a “For the record” online explaining the decision — a description made to provide transparency on the content’s removal.   

Moving forward, the Spring 2026 Managing Team is committed to always running “For the record” editors’ notes in our tri-weekly print edition if AI-generated content is distributed in print. 

We will also attempt to find ways to make our “For the record” editors’ notes more visible online, as the Daily Trojan completely removes AI-generated articles from its website rather than updating them with corrections or clarifications to prevent the spread of misinformation. 

This paper exists to share students’ thoughts on the issues that shape our student life, city and daily civic conversations — from USC housing policies and sports seasons to immigration raids in South Central neighborhoods, involvement fairs on Trousdale Parkway and the events, as well as happenings, that define campus life. When AI writing is passed off as student voices, the campus loses one of the major assets of having a student paper. 

When the University announced an institutional subscription to ChatGPT Edu this semester, it framed the initiative as a way to give students and faculty equitable access to a rapidly emerging “learning, creativity, and digital fluency” tool. In many ways, that is true. AI literacy is quickly becoming a baseline professional skill, and universities across the United States are integrating generative AI into coursework and research as student use skyrockets. 

However, it is dishonest to publish an article under a person’s name if a human was secondary in the writing process, just as it would be dishonest to fabricate a quote or invent a source. 

After a pattern of frequent investigations, we have decided to go public about our policies and experiences not only because transparency is important to our goals as a publication, but also because we believe the discourse around this emerging issue is improved by awareness of how AI is affecting student journalism today.  

We know generative AI will continue to develop, and we know students will continue to experiment with it. The Daily Trojan will keep strengthening its policies, improving transparency and protecting the integrity of student journalism. We ask our writers to take pride in their own voices — imperfect, evolving, but real and human — because those voices are what make this paper worth reading.