Who writes the annual report now?
Annual reports, 10-K filings, narrative disclosure and readability appear on 99 recent papers in the finance and accounting journals, but only 9 of them carry a generative-AI, language-model or AI-generated keyword. If language models now draft the management discussion, do the text measures researchers rely on still mean anything?
What prompted this
Since October 2025, 99 papers carry an annual-report, 10-K, MD&A, narrative-disclosure, readability or textual-analysis keyword (60 in finance journals, 19 in accounting): "10-K filings" on 27, "narrative disclosure" on 13, "readability" on 10. Only 9 of the 99 also carry a generative-AI, ChatGPT, language-model or AI-generated keyword.
Questions
- Can AI-written passages in filings be detected, and what share of recent filings contains them?
- Did readability, tone and boilerplate measures shift after 2023 in a way that reflects the drafting tool rather than the firm?
- Do investors react differently to AI-drafted and human-drafted disclosures, once they can tell them apart?
Data that could help
The text of 10-K filings from SEC EDGAR for 2018–2025, AI-text detectors, and market reactions to filings.
Next step
Run an AI-text detector on the MD&A sections of all 10-K filings for 2021–2025 and track the share flagged by year and by firm size.