# The docket

URL: https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/

Every case on Dead Writing Theory is a real study: our own (its question fixed before measuring, its method and data published on ScriptGrain) or a third-party study, credited to its authors and linked to the original. 7 cases (2 ours, 5 third-party), 21 exhibits.

- [Case No. DWT-001: 27 years of company homepages. The words changed. The sentences did not.](https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/did-chatgpt-change-how-companies-write/) (split verdict; ScriptGrain SGR-004; updated 2026-10-04): On company homepages the "AI voice" is mostly a vocabulary, and an older one than its name suggests. ChatGPT appears to have sped the drift up rather than started it. Markdown: https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/did-chatgpt-change-how-companies-write.md
- [Case No. DWT-002: Where the AI-isms came from. Not an invention. An inheritance.](https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/where-did-ai-isms-come-from/) (verdict for the defence; ScriptGrain SGR-007; updated 2026-10-04): The "AI voice" looks less like an invention than an inheritance: the vocabulary of corporate announcements laid over the rhetorical shapes of older speeches and sermons. Markdown: https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/where-did-ai-isms-come-from.md
- [Case No. DWT-003: A quarter of the press release. The machine is in the room. In a lot of rooms.](https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/a-quarter-of-the-press-release/) (verdict for the prosecution; third-party study: Liang et al., Patterns 6(12), 2025; updated 2026-10-04): By late 2024, roughly 24% of corporate press releases involved LLM-assisted writing. The study measures adoption, not sameness, but the machine is in a lot of rooms. Markdown: https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/a-quarter-of-the-press-release.md
- [Case No. DWT-004: The news that didn't flatten. The fingerprints are there. The flattening is not.](https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/the-news-that-didnt-flatten/) (verdict for the defence; third-party study: Fitterer et al., Proceedings of ACL, Student Research Workshop, 2025; updated 2026-10-04): Machine-style words rose in English news between 2018 and 2024, but lexical diversity did not fall. A real point for the defence on vocabulary, not a knockout. Markdown: https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/the-news-that-didnt-flatten.md
- [Case No. DWT-005: The websites nobody wrote. More sites with little human input. More of them selling.](https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/the-websites-nobody-wrote/) (verdict for the prosecution; third-party study: He et al., arXiv preprint 2605.00087, 2026; updated 2026-10-04): LLM-dominant websites rose from 2.1% to 29.4% of sites sampled between late 2022 and early 2025, and they turn up in how-to search results. A preprint, detector-based. Markdown: https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/the-websites-nobody-wrote.md
- [Case No. DWT-006: Half the articles, and a plateau. Half the articles. Then the rise stopped.](https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/half-the-articles-and-a-plateau/) (split verdict; third-party study, vendor: Paredes et al., Graphite research (Five Percent), 2026; updated 2026-10-04): A vendor study: primarily AI-generated articles reached about half of new English articles by Q1 2025, then the share stopped rising. Detector-based, not peer reviewed. Markdown: https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/half-the-articles-and-a-plateau.md
- [Case No. DWT-007: Better stories, more alike. The stories grew alike. Each one got better.](https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/better-stories-more-alike/) (split verdict; third-party study: Doshi and Hauser, Science Advances, 2024; updated 2026-10-04): In a preregistered experiment, AI story ideas made each story better and the stories as a group more alike: individually better off, collectively narrower. Markdown: https://deadwritingtheory.com/cases/better-stories-more-alike.md
- Case No. DWT-008: pending, under investigation. The next case is being measured.