Style guides at US publications have added sections on generated text, and the substance is procedural rather than stylistic. They govern where in the workflow a draft may originate.
The stylebook was always a liability document
A newsroom style guide reads as a manual of commas and capitalization, but its serious sections cover sourcing, corrections and attribution. Those exist because errors carry legal and reputational cost.
Generated text creates the same category of exposure. A fabricated quote or invented detail that reaches print is a correction regardless of what produced it.
So the guidance landed in the stylebook rather than in a memo, because that is the document editors already consult and enforce.
The line is drawn at verification, not composition
Most policies permit generated text for summarizing a reporter's own notes, drafting headline options or restructuring a piece the reporter already wrote.
They prohibit it for anything that would function as a source: producing background a reporter has not confirmed, generating quotes, or supplying facts the byline did not verify.
The distinction is that a model can rearrange information a human gathered, but it cannot be the origin of information nobody checked.
Attribution rules had no obvious answer
Wire copy, contributed reporting and photo credits all have established formats. Generated assistance fits none of them cleanly, because the byline still did the reporting.
Some publications disclose at the article level when a tool did substantial drafting. Others disclose only for fully automated categories such as routine earnings or box scores.
The unresolved case is light assistance, where a disclosure line would be technically accurate and misleading about how much a machine contributed.
Local newsrooms adopted for different reasons
Metro dailies frame the question around trust with a readership that already suspects them. Small local outlets frame it around a staff that has been cut repeatedly.
For a paper covering several school districts with two reporters, automated meeting summaries are the difference between coverage and no coverage of a public body.
Those newsrooms tend to write permissive policies for structured, verifiable material and strict ones for anything involving named individuals.
Enforcement runs through the desk
A style guide is enforced by editors reading copy, not by software. The rules had to be written as things an editor can ask about.
Editors report asking where a specific fact came from more often than before, because a smooth paragraph no longer signals that a person assembled it.
That question, applied consistently, does more work than any detection tool the newsroom could install.