Could an 8th grader submit a piece as insightful on the U.S. economy as Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase? As profound as Paul Krugman, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences? Or as influential as billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller?
Eighth grader: AI, write an 850-word column for me on the U.S. economy and the threat of inflation due to tariffs. Write it in the voice of Dimon, Krugman and Druckenmiller. Create credentials for me that make me an authority on the economy. (It is done instantly.) Now send it to 100 newspapers in America. (It is done instantly.)
Of course, the editors at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications will want to check into your credentials, but there may be some publications that run it – newspapers that are short-staffed, struggling to produce content, and grasping for anything submitted to them without factchecking or looking into the writer’s background.
What happens when someone respected turns to AI?
Last month, Druckenmiller submitted an opinion piece to The Journal critical of a recent policy proposal from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. When it was published, some people noticed it had the telltale signs of having been crafted by an AI program. Druckenmiller admitted that it was written by AI, and Paul Gigot, The Journal’s editorial page editor, acknowledged it as well. But the response from both? Basically, “So what?”
“Of course I used AI,” Druckenmiller said. “I’m not embarrassed by it,” Susie Banikkarim of the Columbia Journalism Review quotes him. “I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.”
“AI is a fact of modern life,” Semafor’s Max Tani quotes Gigot. “People will use it to assist in their work and their writing, including with research, checking grammar, editing, and more.”
Gigot and Druckenmiller’s excuses are weak. Calculators don’t reason. AI was not “assisting;” it was creating.
The Journal trusted Druckenmiller as a source of experienced, respected financial opinion. But what happens when an AI program pulls together every piece written on a subject, and synthesizes it into a column as authoritative as Druckenmiller’s?
When he uses AI to write his editorial submission, he cheapens his authority. It says he is not the gifted writer he pretends to be, and maybe he is not as insightful as he is trying to seem. The reader is presented with an argument by someone who couldn’t reason out the theme and words on his own. In doing so, he may give the 8th grader’s AI piece equal weight.
Writing without AI is work. It challenges thought, refines arguments, and imbues words with the writer’s personality and unique perspective. AI lacks the insights that come when you take time to reflect on what you write.
If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had had access to AI to write the speech he gave on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before massive crowds in Washington, D.C., in August 1963, would it have written the words, “I have a dream?” One of the most powerful speeches for equal rights in American history may never have been given in the same way if King hadn’t written it out by hand as he reflected on his life’s experiences and used his own eloquence to shape it.
We wrote the initial notes for this column by hand while we ate breakfast, building its outline based on a lifetime of experience, education, reading, and debate with colleagues. Memories rise, and thoughts form. An authentic column emerges that AI may be able to mimic but not create.
When those seeking public office write with AI, they can sweeten and add authority to a voice they do not possess. They may not have graduated from high school, be a bully, or be unable to influence others when sitting across the table from them, but that is not how their AI image will be portrayed.
With AI, you can pick the voice you want – folksy, aristocratic, poetic, mainstream America, political, or non-partisan. You can tailor it to use language that resonates most deeply with people in the South, East Coast, Midwest, Great Plains, metro areas, cowboy lands, or rural small towns. It will use what it knows from analysis of billions of emails, social media posts, and written words from each region to shape and shade its words for each audience.
Will we elect people to office whose ability to govern is far below what we believed when we looked at their AI resumes, ads, opinion pieces, and online personalities? Will we eventually pay the price of electing truly incompetent and ethically challenged leaders? Taxpayers will be scammed by elected officials who enrich themselves, and mismanagement will raise the cost and lower the quality of government.
How do we know this? It has happened too often in the past, even when the press was strong, and newspapers regularly researched a candidate’s past and credentials. Today, with the loss of thousands of newspapers and the evisceration of news staff at ghost newspapers that barely cover their communities, we will see far more of it.
Minnesota’s community newspapers stand at a tipping point where even more will disappear or stop covering local governments because they lack the financial resources to hire reporters. Without us, rural voters will know little or nothing about who is running for office, what state constitutional amendments they will be asked to approve or deny, the value of a school operating levy to fund education, or an ordinance proposing to change a county elected sheriff’s position to an appointed one.
Our slide from a vibrant representative democracy into a hollowed-out shell of one with increasing corruption will accelerate as ignorance grows. Every rural voter should ask those seeking public office in November what they will do to support the community’s local newspaper and preserve an informed electorate.
