This is not a defense of using AI to write. Rather, it’s a critique of the slipshod standards that have long pervaded the op-ed pages of our major newspapers. As University of Maine media historian Michael Socolow has written, the op-ed page, unveiled by The New York Times more than half a century ago, was originally conceived as a way of giving a voice to various members of the community.
That function survives, but the voice, in all too many cases, belongs not to the ostensible author — in many cases an elected official, a business executive or a nonprofit leader — but, rather, to a ghostwriter who’s either a staff member or an outside consultant. Yes, the actual writer talks with the person whose byline will deceptively grace the piece, and yes, that person will also have final approval. But many op-eds are no more the work of the bylined “author” than a major political speech is the original rhetoric of the person delivering it.
(An aside: Why was it all right for Joe Biden, during his 1988 presidential campaign, to use the words of his paid speechwriters but not those of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock? The former was seen as nothing more than how things are done. The latter was castigated as plagiarism, and it drove him out of the race.)
So now we come to the AI outrage du jour: billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller’s recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he (or, rather, “he”) ripped Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for his bond-buyback program, writing, “Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose.” (The rest of it is quite a bit more turgid and opaque than that.) It turned out that Druckenmiller had used AI for quite a bit of the writing.
Susie Banikarim, in awarding a “Dart” to the Journal, notes that Druckenmiller told a reporter for NOTUS, “Of course I used AI. I’m not embarrassed by it. I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.” Banikarim also quotes Socolow, who told her that the Journal’s opinion section is “being enormously devalued by making it fungible, by making an industrial product that can be made completely divorced of human intervention.”
In a statement to Semafor media reporter Max Tani, Journal opinion editor Paul Gigot defended his robot contributor:
AI is a fact of modern life. People will use it to assist in their work and their writing, including with research, checking grammar, editing and more. The question for us is whether what we publish from contributors reflects an author’s original argument, and if the author has standing and credibility to make it. In Stan Druckenmiller’s case, we have had a relationship with him for many years, and nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion.
Argh. But as I said, this is not a defense of AI writing. Rather, I would like to defend original writing, or at least full transparency about who’s actually doing the writing. In his newsletter, Second Rough Draft, Richard J. Tofel observes that AI-written op-eds are similar to ghostwritten op-eds, writing:
Op-eds, or, more generically, opinion pieces signed by a non-staff member and published by a third party, present something of a special case. Many of these, over the years, have been written for rather than by the signatory, with no disclosure. (Think of pieces with the bylines of public officials, including presidents, or CEOs, few of whom are thought of as writers.) Readers likely understand roughly how this works, and thus disclosure seems less compelling, including for the use of AI in composition. Editors who publish op-eds, however, do have a responsibility for knowing who or what has done the writing, and for ensuring that the signatory stands behind every word.
Awkward though it may be, my inclination would be to lean toward the opposite of Tofel’s formula — that is, to require disclosure if a CEO’s op-ed is written by a ghost or by AI. Such disclosure is not only fair to the readers but it would also detract from the strength of their argument. And frankly, it should detract from their argument if they can’t bother to write it themselves. As it is, I’m probably not going to be interested in what a bank president has to say. I’d be even less interested if it were disclosed that they didn’t even write it.
By the way, Semafor fed guest op-eds from the Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post through Pangram, a well-regarded AI detector. It found that the overwhelming majority of commentaries were written entirely by humans, but that a not-insignificant proportion were written partly or even wholly by AI. It’s going to get worse.
Despite my aside about Biden, I think uncredited speechwriting is just something that we’ll have to live with. Since the person giving the speech actually has to deliver it, we can assume, or at least hope, that they’ll engage more deeply with the content and the tone than they might with an op-ed that few people will bother to read.
Like Tofel, I’m a fairly heavy user of AI, especially for research (always with verifiable outside links) and brainstorming interview questions. Also like Tofel, I don’t use it for any part of the writing process, including organizing and proofreading. Maybe that makes me a quasi-Luddite, but writing is how I think through ideas and issues. I’m not trying to make Claude smarter. I’m trying to make me smarter.
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We live in a world where people don’t even write their own tweets. You can’t rely on anything these days.
Like you, Dan, I find AI useful for research and fact-checking. Actually, immensely useful. And, like you (and Hannah Arendt), I find that writing is a form of thinking, an interior dialogue.
One of my deepest concerns is with grade school and high school students who should be learning to think for themselves, but are not. I’ve seen it especially with one granddaughter.
My students and I talk about the fact that though they may be digital natives, they’re not AI natives. But as you say, increasingly everyone is going to be an AI native, and the effects of that are going to be devastating.