A new day, a new controversy about a newspaper article written not by the person with the byline — but by an artificial intelligence chatbot.
The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday defended billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who faced scorn on social media after acknowledging he used AI to write an op-ed for the paper that criticized Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
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The Journal’s posture set it apart from other outlets, which have taken action against writers who used AI to craft their prose.
The controversy also highlights another reality: For politicians and celebrities, ghostwriting has long been a norm.
Prodded on his use of an AI chatbot, Druckenmiller responded with a shrug after his writing was flagged by AI detection tool Pangram.
“Of course I used AI,” Druckenmiller told the D.C.-based media outlet NOTUS. And he said he’s “not embarrassed by it.”
“There’s a reason I moved from my English major to being an economics major,” Druckenmiller told the outlet. “I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.”
The Journal was quick to defend the piece. Paul Gigot, the paper’s editorial page editor, said in a statement that people’s use of AI to write, research and edit articles is now a “fact of modern life.”
“The question for us is whether what we publish from contributors reflects an author’s original argument, and if the author has the standing and credibility to make it,” Gigot said in the statement. “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.”
Media ethicist Kelly McBride, the senior vice president at the nonprofit media institute Poynter, said the Journal’s position on Druckenmiller’s op-ed differentiates it from “almost every newsroom” in the country, most of which have policies that prohibit AI-generated writing — ”and for a number of good reasons.”
“AI just isn’t very good at it — it tends to create really mediocre content” and has a habit of hallucinating false information, McBride told Straight Arrow. Readers, she noted, overwhelmingly oppose AI-generated media.
“News consumers consider that a form of cheating,” she said. Journalists nationwide are being fired for attempting to pass off AI-written text as their own, and contributors including businesspeople and politicians, she said, should be required “to abide by the same standards.”
How should editors treat AI-generated content?
Indeed, AI use is now rampant in the news business. One recent survey, from the public relations platform Muck Rack, found a whopping 82% of journalists use at least one AI tool, up from 77% a year ago. Still, many have reservations about AI, with a quarter of journalists citing “unchecked AI as a top industry concern.”
It’s unclear, however, how many reporters are using AI to write article drafts. Certainly, many are. Wired recently published a feature on technology journalists who use AI to assist them at each step of the process, from crunching data to fact-checking to writing drafts.
The Journal notes in its AI policy that the tools are used to assist “complex data-driven investigations, to summarize articles,” and for other purposes, but that it upholds its “long-held values of accuracy, accountability, originality, quality, transparency and respect for intellectual property.”
Some outlets have taken notice of AI-generated articles and are pushing back on the trend, particularly after the chatbots’ output was flagged for potential plagiarism and fabrication.
Even Wired was embroiled in an AI-slop controversy: Last year, the technology publication and Business Insider were among outlets that retracted articles that editors later learned were AI-generated — all by a freelance journalist who apparently didn’t even exist.
Earlier this year, The New York Times ended its relationship with a freelance journalist after the paper learned he used AI to help write a book review — which apparently plagiarized a review that first appeared in The Guardian.
While Druckenmiller’s AI-generated article was met with a shrug by The Journal’s editors, Harvard professor Ricardo Hausmann faced a vastly different reaction for using AI to help write an op-ed for the Financial Times earlier this month. After Hausmann’s article was criticized, the outlet added an editor’s note: “It has come to our attention that AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement.”
To the Financial Times, Hausmann’s AI use appeared to be acceptable — so long as it was disclosed to readers.
When AI tools “influence audience-facing content,” their use should be disclosed to readers, according to a model AI ethics guidebook created by Poynter. The AI guide, which has been adopted by multiple news outlets, notes that all AI-generated content demands “human verification.” Acceptable AI uses under the policy include researching topics, headline experimentation and crafting article summaries.
Ultimately, McBride said, it’s the responsibility of news outlets to police AI use in their newsrooms.
“We have to pay attention to what the audience is saying, we cannot simply dismiss it as hysteria,” McBride said about a growing backlash against AI and, more broadly, the technology industry. “The only thing we have to sell is our own credibility.”
Newsrooms are adopting AI policies
Nowadays, news editors are being hit with AI slop from every direction, and some are growing increasingly frustrated. One news outlet, The Food Section, has taken a novel approach to combating the deluge of AI-generated public relations emails flooding editor Hanna Raskin’s inbox. For the time being, the publication will accept story pitches delivered by phone — a throwback to a long-gone-by era.
For publishers, AI has presented a dilemma as they take on technology companies for scraping their proprietary content without permission or compensation to power chatbot responses. Lawsuits from The New York Times and other publishers have accused Big Tech companies of copyright infringement and of rigging the online advertising market.
Still, the outlets themselves have increasingly baked AI into their workflows. As Straight Arrow recently reported, for example, both The Washington Post and USA Today now operate their own chatbots, which are trained specifically on their news archives and are designed to boost reader engagement and retention.
AI is being leveraged by newsrooms of all sizes, including local non-profit outlets. More than four-fifths of nonprofit news outlets now use AI, according to a recent survey by the Institute for Nonprofit News, a trade group. While few outlets reported using AI to write or edit stories, the tools are now routinely used to support workflows, including to record meetings, write emails to funders and conduct data analyses.
Straight Arrow uses AI to help produce features such as Media Miss, which analyzes coverage from multiple news outlets, and to generate story summaries. However, editors review all AI content, and AI is never used to write news articles.
When the author isn’t a chatbot — but a ghost
For politicians, politicians and celebrities, under-the-radar writing professionals — generally called ghostwriters — have long been working behind the scenes. As one ghostwriter put it in a Forbes article in 2023, professional ghostwriters are routinely called on to help craft messages, speeches and newspaper op–eds in compelling ways.
“Ghostwriters have been the handmaidens to politicians, writing policy books and autobiographies since the time of Caesar,” wrote Miles Rote, the co-founder of Author.Inc, a firm that helps business leaders “publish exceptional books in their authentic voice, without the old barriers.”
Rote pointed to a ghostwriter for former President John F. Kennedy, who played a role in writing the president’s speeches and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage. Kennedy once called the ghostwriter, Ted Sorensen, his “intellectual blood bank.”
For both AI-generated articles and those written with ghostwriters, the issue comes down to transparency and authenticity. The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics notes that ethical journalism “means taking responsibility for one’s work” and being transparent to the public about the reporting process.
The Code of Ethics also compels journalists to hold their peers accountable, calling on the industry to “expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations.”
Modern politicians have also used ghostwriters, and have faced criticism for doing so. They include Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, both of whom were chastised for sharing classified information with professional writers.
Author Luke Burgis, who runs an entrepreneurship program at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., took aim at both AI-written articles and those crafted by ghostwriters. In a post on X, he offered a blunt critique of the Journal op-ed: “It’s terrible.” The paper’s defense of the article, he wrote, “was even worse.”
“My view on this is that if you’re going to write partisan slop, it’s just better to use the AI,” which can “get the job done slightly cheaper” than hiring a ghostwriter, Burgis wrote. “But if you want to write something real, write it yourself.”
Burgis also took a jab at Vice President JD Vance who, while serving as the country’s second-most powerful bureaucrat, found the time to publish his latest book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.”
“P.S. If you think JD Vance wrote his latest book,” Burgis wrote, “I don’t even know what to tell you.”
Vance’s publisher has said the vice president wrote the book himself, intermittently over a decade after he published his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
While politicians and CEOs routinely turn to ghostwriters to craft op-eds, Poynter’s McBride noted, the practice is difficult to detect and public officials are typically not transparent about the practice. For articles that carry the bylines of politicians and other high-profile people, outlets typically don’t prohibit their use of ghostwriters because they “are so common that it’s almost impossible to separate out.”
AI-generated content, she said, is a different story.
“We can detect AI writing,” she said, “and I think we should use detection tools to ensure that writing that is submitted on behalf of an individual is complying with our standards.”
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