AI writing has already begun to appear on the opinion pages

Semafor: “Humans are still writing the vast majority of guest columns published in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, a Semafor analysis found — but large language models were creeping in well before a high-profile Journal op-ed provoked controversy this week. Over the past month, 10 out of 310 guest submissions to the three publications were labeled as at least 80% “AI” by AI detector Pangram, suggesting AI is not yet making a meaningful dent in human contributions to the most prestigious publications. Another 40 articles were partially AI-generated. Pangram uses custom AI models to analyze text and other content for AI and, according to a spokesperson, has a .01% false positive rate. If Pangram finds more than 80% of the text is AI generated, it is labeled as AI. In informal testing by Semafor, Pangram was very accurate in detecting AI-written text, though some complain of false positives. Semafor’s analysis follows a debate sparked Tuesday, when billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller — and later The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page editor, Paul Gigot — stood behind Druckenmiller’s use of AI to write an opinion piece critiquing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s interventions in the bond markets. The piece had the wooden hallmarks of AI text (“This wasn’t liquidity management, it was price management,“) but served its purpose as a blunt rebuke from a titan of finance to his protégé, and circulated widely in Washington and on Wall Street before — and after — its AI roots were confirmed. Pangram gave it a 100% AI score. “There’s a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major,” Druckenmiller told NOTUS. “I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.” Gigot said in a statement that AI is “a fact of modern life,” and that what matters 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.” The New York Times prohibits the use of AI in “developing and drafting guest essays.” A Times spokesperson didn’t comment on Pangram’s finding that an Aug. 2 guest essay by Jen Easterly, who served as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under President Joe Biden, was flagged as AI. In one example of some of the text that was flagged by Pangram, Easterly wrote “In an era of nation-state cyberconflict, the ultimate measure of resilience is brutally simple: When attackers get in, clean water must still come out.” Easterly did not respond to a request for comment. The tool identified 11 other guest Times articles over the past 30 days that were partially AI-written, according to the analysis. Pangram also identified an Aug. 9 guest column in The Washington Post, Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem, by Dartmouth provost Santiago Schnell, as 100% AI-written. “I wrote this essay based on my own thinking. Then, I used ChatGPT to refine a few arguments, check for grammatical errors, and submit it to the Washington Post,” Schnell wrote, adding that the piece “went through multiple rounds of edits by the Post.” Stanford research has also suggested that detection tools sometimes flag work by people whose first language isn’t English. Schnell, a native of Venezuela who has a PhD in mathematical biology, noted there is evidence that “they are biased against non-native English speakers, such as myself.” A spokesperson for The Washington Post referred to its policy that requires guest writers to confirm their submission was “not created or manipulated with artificial intelligence or editing software,” but did not comment on the 17 guest articles published in the paper and found by Pangram to have been partially or totally written by AI. Earlier this month, The Financial Times appended a note to a guest column after readers questioned whether it was written using AI. The FT, which conceded AI had been used to shorten the article, prohibits the use of AI in the writing process…”