{"id":5568,"date":"2026-09-29T11:03:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T11:03:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=5568"},"modified":"2026-09-29T11:03:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T11:03:29","slug":"stop-asking-writers-if-they-used-ai-just-ask-them-how-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=5568","title":{"rendered":"Stop asking writers if they used AI. Just ask them how much"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2178039628-e1790630709526.jpg?w=2048\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It has become the most loaded question in modern writing: \u201cDid you use A.I.?\u201d It\u2019s 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 \u201cwrite me an Op-ed!\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Last month, billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller admitted to using A.I. to write a <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em> op-ed attacking Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent\u2019s bond-market interventions. Readers quickly spotted the telltale prose (\u201cThis wasn\u2019t liquidity management, it was price management\u201d), and the A.I. detector Pangram scored the piece 100 percent A.I.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When NOTUS asked him about it, Druckenmiller was unashamed. \u201cOf course I used AI,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not embarrassed by it \u2026 I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The <em>Journal<\/em> was similarly unapologetic. \u201cAI is a fact of modern life,\u201d editorial page editor Paul Gigot said in a statement. The next day, in a column, Gigot went further: \u201cMr. Druckenmiller\u2019s sin against the media pharisees was admitting its use.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Setting aside Druckenmiller\u2019s flawed analogy (math has one right answer; writing doesn\u2019t), the saga exposed the real problem with writing in the A.I. age: we keep asking writers a yes-or-no question (did you use A.I.?) when the answer is increasingly somewhere in between. Druckenmiller said he rejected many of the chatbot\u2019s suggestions and that A.I. didn\u2019t write \u201cthe whole thing.\u201d Pangram, meanwhile, scored it 100 percent A.I. In writing and reporting, nuance matters. Readers want to know whose idea it was, and whose words they\u2019re reading: a person\u2019s or a chatbot\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019ve covered A.I. for years. At NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of news sites, I tracked A.I.-generated misinformation, and for <em>The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0I built my own A.I. propaganda site for $105 to show how easy it was. Today I run\u00a0<em>Newsreel<\/em>, a media startup where we vet independent journalists before they can publish. Even with that vetting, readers still want to know how much A.I. went into what they\u2019re reading.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, here\u2019s my proposal: a simple, self-reported label, printed with the byline or at the end of the piece. Something like this:<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The \u2018Who Wrote This?\u2019 Scale<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>H5 Human:<\/strong> No A.I. was used at all. (Spellcheck doesn\u2019t count.)<\/li>\n<li><strong>H4 Assisted:<\/strong> A.I. helped with everything but the writing: research, fact-check prompts, headline ideas, grammar fixes. It never rewrote a sentence, and the prose is entirely the author\u2019s.<\/li>\n<li><strong>H3 Polished:<\/strong> The author wrote the full draft, then A.I. rewrote parts of it (tightening sentences, condensing paragraphs, reordering sections).\u00a0<\/li>\n<li><strong>H2 Co-written:<\/strong> The author and A.I. went back and forth. Some paragraphs started with the model, some with the author, but the argument is the author\u2019s and the author did a real edit.<\/li>\n<li><strong>H1 Ghostwritten:<\/strong> A.I. wrote the first full draft from the author\u2019s own notes, interviews or reporting. The ideas are the author\u2019s; most of the sentences aren\u2019t.<\/li>\n<li><strong>H0 A.I. Slop:<\/strong> A.I. wrote it from a prompt alone, with light edits at most. The ideas, structure and voice are the model\u2019s.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To be clear, I\u2019m not the first to suggest this. The open-source AI Usage Scale proposes six very similar levels, and at least one publisher, The Datatech Times, now prints an A.I. level next to every byline.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Still, adoption of such scales is rare. It shouldn\u2019t be. Writers are already running scared of an A.I. witch hunt: some are scrubbing em dashes from their prose, and in April, The <em>Journal<\/em>\u2018s own James Taranto compared Pangram to a \u201cdefamation machine\u201d fueling false accusations.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A self-reported scale like \u201cWho Wrote This?\u201d could protect writers who use A.I. for research, editing or brainstorming. Once you\u2019ve disclosed how you wrote something, there\u2019s nothing left to expose.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Readers care less about a writer using A.I. than about being misled. For example, voters are not upset by a president using a speechwriter because everyone knows that, great orators like Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding, this has long been a common practice in politics. The rich and famous\u00a0 have routinely hired ghostwriters, speechwriters and P.R. staffers to craft language that goes out under their name.\u00a0 .\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Of course, since the \u201cWho Wrote This?\u201d<strong> <\/strong>scale relies on self-reporting, some writers will be tempted to shade the truth. But a label gives readers an answer without having to run a piece through Pangram, and knowing detectors exist should keep most writers honest.\u00a0 After all, claiming a story you wrote is H4 and getting caught at H0 is a lot more embarrassing than just saying it was H1.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1845, a journalist accused Alexandre Dumas, author of \u201cThe Three Musketeers\u201d and \u201cThe Count of Monte Cristo,\u201d of running a \u201cnovel factory\u201d staffed by hidden collaborators. Dumas sued and won. But the question at the heart of that fight never went away: Who wrote this? If we\u00a0 can\u2019t stop people from asking\u00a0 it, at least we can start answering it honestly.\u00a0 Oh, and this article, I hereby reveal, is <strong>H3 Polished:<\/strong> The author wrote the full draft, then A.I. rewrote parts of it (tightening sentences, condensing paragraphs, reordering sections).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of <\/em>Fortune<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>#Stop #writers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has become the most loaded &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5569,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[610,42,8654],"class_list":["post-5568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-media","tag-stop","tag-writers"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Stop asking writers if they used AI. Just ask them how much - Finance News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=5568\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"zh_CN\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stop asking writers if they used AI. 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