Opinion | AI: Ghostwriter in the Machine

I use artificial intelligence when I write articles, including this one. I run partial or complete drafts through a chatbot and ask what it thinks. It spits out copious suggestions, some of which inspire me to make revisions and improvements. AI is also an immensely powerful research tool, able to find useful information via queries too vague or abstract to be effective in an ordinary Google search. For this essay, I used it to track down a magazine article I dimly remembered reading almost 40 years ago. As you’ll see, that old piece turned out to contain a killer quote.

Some self-styled guardians of journalism think I should include a paragraph like the preceding one in every article I write. “Transparency means that the use of AI is disclosed to readers in a clear, honest, and obvious manner,” Pangram, which makes an AI tool that purports to identify AI-generated writing, asserts on its marketing blog. “Whether journalists use AI to generate leads, engage in research, or create visuals, their audience always deserves to know.” The post calls such transparency one of “four non-negotiable principles.”

This is bad advice, and I won’t follow it. The repetition would quickly become boring, and my readers deserve better. Curiously, Pangram and its supporters also insist that I should outsource my judgment to AI in my capacity as features editor of the Journal’s opinion pages. “I suggest the WSJ use Pangram to screen all content,” Kevin O’Connor, a general partner of ScOp Venture Capital, emailed me in response to my April article criticizing Pangram for unreliability. ScOp led Pangram’s seed funding in 2025 and participated in another funding round this July.

I asked Pangram CEO Max Spero if the company has any newspapers or other traditional news organizations among its customers. “Out of client confidentiality, we decline to comment on this matter,” he replied. So transparency is negotiable after all.