Dan Kennedy, a long time journalist and a professor at Northeastern University, has a great piece calling out AI news commentaries as an abomination. But asks are they really any worse than ghostwritten op-eds?
As Kennedy reports, 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.”
With AI, things get worse – I think. Per Kennedy,
“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.””
No shame on Druckenmiller’s part nor any shame on the part of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editor Paul Gigot’s part either, as reported by Joshua Benton, Senior Writer and the former director of the Nieman Journalism Lab.
“AI is a fact of modern life…nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion,” Gigot said. In a follow-up column, Gigot said there was no need to disclose Druckenmiller’s AI use, arguing that “it wouldn’t be honest for me to grandstand that our contributors never use a tool like AI. Mr. Druckenmiller’s sin against the media pharisees was admitting its use.”
Seems a lot of credibility and human emotion, insight and commentary is lost with AI.
I pushed AI to see what it could do in my writing, but never to write a piece. As an Irish Catholic and not wanting to mislead readers, I’d feel too guilty.
I am now back to how Kennedy, someone I have gained great respect for across the blogosphere, uses AI in writing,
” 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.”