It has become the most loaded question in modern writing: “Did you use A.I.?” It’s also the wrong question. A writer who asked a chatbot to rework a sentence, one who asked for a careful fact check with sources, and one who threw out a few ideas and said to “write me an Op-ed!” represent totally different uses of this new brand of assistance. I would argue that most writers should be using AI in some form. What readers need is a better question, and a scale to help answer it.
Last month, billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller admitted to using AI to write a Wall Street Journal op-ed attacking Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s bond-market interventions. Readers quickly spotted the telltale prose (“This wasn’t liquidity management, it was price management”), and the AI detector Pangram scored the piece 100% AI.
