Any good op-ed can spark a public conversation, but most won’t start a debate over the nature of opinion writing itself. Last week, a Wall Street Journal piece by the billionaire financier Stanley Druckenmiller pulled it off.
The op-ed itself is about whether the Treasury Department should continue trying to lower long-term bond yields. (Druckenmiller says no.) The piece has a few telltale signs of being produced by AI. (“This wasn’t liquidity management, it was price management.” “If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear, that isn’t a crisis. It is an invoice.”) NOTUS reporter Jeff Stein rang him up to ask and Druckenmiller acknowledged it.
Now, in most cases of that-smells-like-AI discourse, this is the moment where the writer offers some combination of denial, explanation, and apology — and the piece gets an editor’s note or taken down altogether. What made this episode different is that neither Druckenmiller nor Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot offered any regrets or shame. “I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems,” Druckenmiller said.
“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.”
Lots of op-eds, he noted, are actually written by PR staffers rather than the name in the byline, much the way we accept that politicians employ speechwriters — how different is AI? (New York Focus ran 43 recent op-eds from New York politicians through the AI detection tool Pangram. The majority of them were flagged for having at least some AI-generated text.)
I wanted to see if other U.S. newspapers were following the Journal’s lead in blessing the use of AI in opinion pieces. I reached out to editors at 24 prominent newspapers, and none that I heard from were willing to follow Gigot down that path. There were slight distinctions around how aggressively different papers police AI use — for example, proactively asking all contributors to state that they haven’t used AI versus only asking when a piece smells fishy. But most echoed the San Francisco Chronicle’s Matthew Fleischer: “Our audience is paying for the words and thoughts of human beings.”
The Oregonian
Helen Jung, opinion editor:
I have fed submissions through AI detectors, though I don’t find them super reliable. I know in some cases, an author has used AI to polish a piece, though the research, thought process and writing was theirs (according to them). But generally, each op-ed that I select for publication goes through at least a couple back-and-forth exchanges of edits and revisions between the author and me, so pieces can and do change significantly at times.
I think one thing we’ll need to grapple with in developing a policy is this: Businesses, nonprofits and governmental agencies very frequently have paid communications staffers who write op-eds on behalf of the organization’s leaders. We don’t have an issue with that. So I feel like it’s unfair to prohibit everyday community members from using a tool to improve what they have written (though again, not to generate content).
I will say that letters to the editor don’t get the same editing attention that op-eds do, although I have a freelance editor who fact-checks the letters and works with authors when she makes significant edits. The need for consistency is another reason we should get that policy together sooner than later.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Brandon McGinley, assistant managing editor for opinion and community:
With that being said, I’m happy to let you know how we used to handle the question of AI composition. (I should also note that by “we,” I’m referring to a team of 2, including me, who pushed out a ton of content.) The short answer is that if we sussed out AI usage in composition, we wouldn’t take the piece.
However, given the limitations imposed by our skeleton team, we did not proactively ask contributors about their AI use. That might be different now, if we still ran op-eds, because the tech and its adoption have advanced so quickly that AI composition is less obvious to the naked eye and more and more people use it as a matter of course. But until May, we relied on our gut.
The Denver Post
Megan Schrader, editor of the editorial pages:
We have run one or two letters in the past where we asked the letter writer to disclose that AI wrote the response. The letter writer explained the prompt they used and which service they used and then included a small portion of the response in quotes and attributed it to ChatGPT. I am not sure if I would do this again going forward, and I definitely would not do it for a full column submission.
We are looking at making certain these policies are clear and easily available on our website.
San Francisco Chronicle
Matthew Fleischer, editorial page editor:
We have thus far not run a piece where someone has disclosed AI use — or has obviously used AI without disclosing — for the writing of a piece. I suppose someone could have submitted something and not disclosed. Anecdotally, however, AI Opinion pieces are almost always pretty bad and easy to spot. I’m loathe to explain the giveaways, because the people who submit these pieces without disclosing will know how they’ve been caught and adjust their practices.
So, I don’t think we’ve been fooled. But it’s possible.
We would not knowingly run a piece written by AI. If the writer used AI for certain parts of the piece, we would ask them to rewrite in their own words.
My general view is that our audience is paying for the words and thoughts of human beings. Where AI can help people express their own ideas more accurately that’s great. Argumentation should have a factual basis and AI is a useful tool for both fact-checking and finding primary source materials that strengthen rhetoric. But the human writing of a piece — with all the quirks and flaws that can come with it — is an essential part of the package we provide to our readers.
Los Angeles Times
Philip Gray, op-ed editor:
Our guidelines online for submitting an op-ed state that submissions should not include AI-generated text. It is not a regular topic of discussion during the back and forth of the editing process.
If we knew that a submission that we were editing included AI-generated text, our response would be to remedy that, not simply to disclose it to readers. We would either decline the submission or work with the sender to excise any AI-generated portions of the piece.
USA Today
A USA Today Co. corporate spokesperson:
As a matter of policy, we do not accept submissions written with any assistance beyond basic spelling and grammar checking tools. Our reviewers are trained to flag submissions potentially written using AI in order to comply with the policy.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
David Plazas, opinion editor:
Our standards policies require us to disclose use of AI. Since I arrived in May 2025, I have not had to do that and have not knowingly published any essay written by AI.
Chicago Tribune
Chris Jones, editorial page editor:
No. Not at this juncture. We are looking for human opinions, crafted and honed by humans. Period.
[Do you routinely ask contributors if they’ve used AI? Only when a piece seems unusually AI-like? Or not at all?]
They attest in our agreement with them that they did not use AI. When a piece seems unusually AI-like, we use software to try and figure that out.
Here are a few other metro newspapers that make a ban on AI usage in op-eds explicit on their websites:
The Boston Globe: Submissions must “not be created using Artificial Intelligence (spell check, punctuation, and grammar suggestions built into Google Docs or Microsoft Word are fine, but using AI tools to generate the content of the submission, explain ideas, create a draft, make writing or tone suggestions, and/or suggest alternate phrasing or word choices is not).”
The Philadelphia Inquirer: “A few other things that we don’t accept…items written by or with the assistance of large language models or other artificial intelligence programs.”
The Seattle Times: “We do not accept AI-generated op-eds.”
Kansas City Star: “Please do not use artificial intelligence to generate the text of your letter.”
The New York Times: “All writing and visuals that freelancers submit to The Times must be the product of human creativity and craft, and all submissions must consist solely of their original reporting, writing and other work…Freelance contributors must not submit any material for publication that contains content generated, modified or enhanced by [generative AI] tools, or that has been input into these tools.”
