Weeks ago, hedge fund investor Stanley Druckenmiller wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal criticizing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s decision to increase government purchases of long-term Treasury bonds in an effort to bring down yields. The op-ed sparked controversy, not so much for the fact that Druckenmiller was publicly rebuking his former protege, but because it appeared to have been drafted with the help of AI.
Readers who put the piece through the AI-detection tool Pangram had their suspicions confirmed. Backlash ensued, with critics calling the piece “Claudeslop,” questioning if Druckenmiller had written any of it, and debating whether the opinion editors at The Wall Street Journal had a duty to prevent AI-written work from being published on their platform. But while some critics might have been expecting a retraction or an apology, Druckenmiller and The Wall Street Journal defended their use of AI. Druckenmiller responded that he wasn’t embarrassed about having used AI, and the editor of the Journal’s opinion section stood by him, stating that while the writing might not have been his own, the ideas in the op-ed were.
