5 Rules for Better AI Writing

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
If you use AI to write an op-ed, does that devalue your thoughts? Believe it or not, that's been maybe the biggest question the AI community has been discussing for the last couple of days. When one of Finance's biggest voices dropped an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal critiquing the Treasury Secretary and current monetary policy, he probably didn't think that the big discourse was going to be about how he wrote the op-ed. And yet, that's what it was, because the piece you see was very, very clearly written by AI.
People reacted like it was some big scandal. Except then, both the famous financier and the opinion editor at the Wall Street Journal said, yeah, of course he used AI.
So if we now live in a world where AI writing is totally normal, how can we make it actually good?
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Believe it or not, one of the biggest conversations around AI for the last couple of days has been around AI writing, specifically the legitimacy of it, disclosures around it, and how all of those things might be changing.
The specific context for this was an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal by investor Stanley Druckenmiller. The op-ed called Let the Bond Market Speak was a fairly full-throated critique of Treasury Secretary Scott Besant. Now, I'm not going to get into the substance of Druckenmiller's specific argument, as that's a totally different show than this one. But the things that are worth noting are, one, that Druckenmiller has a legendary status among finance folks, among other achievements, running a hedge fund that had zero losing years between 1981 and 2010, which is completely unprecedented before or afterwards. And two, that the focus of this piece is not some secondary or tertiary topic, but cuts to the quick of macroeconomic policy right now.
In other words, the op-ed from a substance perspective at least matters.
And yet, extremely quickly, the substance was not what people were talking about. Instead, it was the fact that the piece is replete with just about every egregious AIism that exists today. It is, for example, full of it's not this, it's that. If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear, that isn't a crisis, it's an invoice. This wasn't liquidity management, it was price management, and a mistake far larger than 4 billion suggests. AI detectors like Pangrim quickly identified the chance that it was AI generated at 100% and some folks were not happy. JBonX writes, I don't understand how people sniff this out as AI. I mean, apart from running it through Pangrim. Why would Druckenmiller put his name on AI slop? He's fine with doing that, even though these allegedly aren't his words. Neil Sybart writes, why did the Wall Street Journal not disclose that Druckenmiller used AI to write his piece? Such disclosure should be mandatory.
Widely followed markets commentator, Jesse Livermore writes, presenting AI slop as if it were your own writing is plagiarism. Full stop. You're taking credit for words and phrases you did not write. So Druckenmiller, having been caught out, admitted sheepishly that yes, indeed, he had used AI and apologized and said he'd do better next time, right?
Wrong. His response instead was, bro, of course I used AI.
In addition to the literal line, of course I used AI, Druckenmiller added, there's a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major. I'm not embarrassed by it. I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.
Wall Street opinion editor Paul Jai Goh backed Druckenmiller up with Jai Goh saying, AI is a fact of modern life. People will use it to assist their work in their writing, including with research, checking grammar, editing, and more. 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 no one can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion. So clear as day here, the journal's op-ed position is that what matters is the sincerity of the ideas, not the unique human flavor of the words used to express them.