AI slop passed another milestone this week: A Wall Street Journal op-ed was written largely by AI, and both the author and the outlet defended its use.
Former hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller published an opinion column on Monday, criticizing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a onetime colleague, for a recent intervention in the bond market. When AI-detector Pangram flagged the piece as 100% AI, Druckenmiller shrugged: “Of course I used AI... I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.”
Paul Gigot, who edits the Wall Street Journal editorial page, agreed:
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. 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.
Like many, I’m irritated by the notion of someone passing off AI work as their own without at least labeling it as such, but I am willing to extend some benefit of the doubt if the final quality is good. It isn’t. I skimmed the op-ed itself and found it readable but sloppy, filled with the repetitive tics that characterize the raw output of many current LLMs. Better editing, even with LLMs, could have helped; this was just plain lazy.
I find myself wondering about the cause of this style, which many LLMs seem to share. Maybe the use of synthetic data, generated by other AIs, has made writing worse; maybe it’s another example of AI converging on degenerate patterns that, by some quirk of the training process, are scored highly by automated graders.
In any case, there seems to be a trend. AI output has increasingly seeped into journalism and public writing. A 2025 study flagged about 9% of newspaper articles as partly or fully AI. For a while, prominent articles caught using AI were removed or retracted; this month the Financial Times, whose official editorial policy is “no AI,” let a flagged article pass with only a disclaimer added. Now we have a sitting editor saying, “AI is a fact of modern life” and that someone with the right “standing and credibility” can pass off an AI’s work as their own.
To be fair, op-eds were often ghostwritten by humans long before AI entered the picture. It doesn’t seem egregiously wrong to me for someone to lean on a ghostwriter to get their ideas out, just a little lazy; but it’s still a bad habit that degrades the commons when the final quality is poor or the real author goes uncredited.
I worry that journalistic pressures — especially speed and the cost of quality — will lead more news outlets to let AI write articles and overlook the resulting sloppiness. I worry more that AI will one day become good enough to remove the sloppiness, and then we’ll be getting our news from minds with alien goals we don’t understand and can’t control.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
I once heard it claimed that OpenAI once tried to train their models not to sound so much Like That, but alignment metrics fell off a cliff.