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AI in Text Index: 10-K Risk Factors
Words language models overuse in S&P 500 annual reports, Item 1A, latest 10-K per company, against the level in 10-Ks filed before ChatGPT (= one)
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Words language models overuse · Continuation · the recent trend, flattening · 30 days
Ordinary business words (control) · Continuation · the recent trend, flattening · 30 days
Dashed: the projection from the latest reading. Shaded: the range about two in three outcomes land in. A projection, not a promise.
The AI in Text Index counts words from published research on the vocabulary language models overuse (Kobak et al.; Liang et al.), fixed before Palanor counted anything. Not an AI detector: it measures vocabulary across hundreds of companies and never says whether any company or document used AI. ChatGPT was released at the end of November 2022. The control counts twenty ordinary business words the same way. Checked against two independent methods (Fast-DetectGPT; Liang et al.): neither confirmed nor contradicted the rise, because both proved too weak on this kind of text to tell. Details are in the methodology. Each reading holds a year of filings, and most risk-factor text is carried from one year to the next, so the line moves slowly.
The AI in Text Index, run on the risk-factor sections of S&P 500 annual reports filed with the SEC. Risk factors are written and reviewed by lawyers and rarely rewritten from scratch, so a rise here shows the vocabulary reaching formal disclosure, one filing season at a time.
What this chart reads
- AI in Text Index: S&P 500 10-K risk factorsas “Words language models overuse”latest 2026-10-22
- AI in Text Index: control words, S&P 500 10-K risk factorsas “Ordinary business words (control)”latest 2026-10-22
Sources
AI in Text Index: S&P 500 10-K risk factors. Source: Palanor calculation from Item 1A (Risk Factors) of annual reports on Form 10-K filed with the SEC (public domain), as parsed by Palanor. Each S&P 500 member's latest 10-K filed in the trailing 365 days, members on the reading date. Risk-factor sections are largely carried from year to year, so they change slowly. A value is published only when at least 150 companies have a 10-K in the window.
AI in Text Index: control words, S&P 500 10-K risk factors. Source: Palanor calculation from Item 1A (Risk Factors) of annual reports on Form 10-K filed with the SEC (public domain), as parsed by Palanor. Each S&P 500 member's latest 10-K filed in the trailing 365 days, members on the reading date. Risk-factor sections are largely carried from year to year, so they change slowly. A value is published only when at least 150 companies have a 10-K in the window.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.