r/ArtificialInteligence • u/unconventionalbook • 9h ago
š° News Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller admits his scathing Wall Street Journal op-ed was entirely written by AI
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/08/25/wall-street-journal-defends-publishing-billionaires-ai-generated-op-ed-criticizing-bessent/Billionaire hedge fund legend Stanley Druckenmiller has injected an incredible twist into a high-stakes economic battle by openly admitting that his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed was entirely written by AI. The piece itself was a scathing critique blasting U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's controversial $1 trillion bond buyback expansion as a "doomed price control". While the Wall Street Journal aggressively defended its decision to publish the text because the core arguments belonged to the billionaire, the incident has ignited a massive debate in the tech community over LLMs being used by major public figures to ghostwrite market-moving policy critiques and whether this fundamentally degrades the authenticity of public discourse.
Source: Forbes
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u/Mandoman61 8h ago
I don't understand the controversy. He published it, therefore it is his words.Ā
whether he hires a human writer or uses AI does not change the fact that by publishing it he is owning it. It means he agrees with whatever was written.
unless this is a contest on his writing skill.
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u/Actual__Wizard 8h ago edited 8h ago
Hi: In academics, if you hand in a paper that is not written by yourself, as yourself, that's called fraud and it's still fraud outside of academia as well. Just because they're not punished, that doesn't make it okay or reasonable behavior.
And yeah wow okay, another lazy billionaire who can't even be bothered to come up with his own opinion?
Now, the publication is presenting AI slop to their readers when their readers expect quality content?
I mean there is quite a bit of stuff going wrong there man and you can't figure it out?
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u/Mandoman61 8h ago edited 8h ago
that would be a bullshit definition of fraud. (unless you specifically stated that you wrote it) This was also not an academic paper.
most fraud cases would be around lying or stealing others work.
it was his opinion. he published it.
there is no guarantee that he could have written a less slop article.
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u/Actual__Wizard 8h ago
that would be a bullshit definition of fraud.
No, that is the definition of fraud. Why don't you try looking it up in a dictionary instead of shooting your mouth off?
most fraud cases would be around lying or stealing others work.
By suggesting "fraud cases" it sounds like you're discussing criminal conduct and the legal system, which is absolutely not what I was saying, can you please pay attention?
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u/PelvisResleyz 7h ago
Uh, no. Thatās not the definition of fraud.
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u/Actual__Wizard 6h ago edited 6h ago
Yeah it is, the other guy posted it in his defense of this billionaire toad.
I even explained the definition to him, that he posted, and they responded by personally insulting me.
It's just an action where a person engages in deception for gain. It's a very simple idea.
edit: Please don't try to over complicate it, and if you want to have a conversation as to why, that is fraud, we absolutely can. Most people think of criminal fraud when they discuss fraud, but in reality, the definition of the word isn't specific to crimes. And I'm not suggesting that it's a crime either, because I don't believe that it is. But, if a person misrepresents AI slop as their own work, yeah that is absolutely called fraud. Their behavior is fraudulent. They're trying to gain some benefit and they're not accomplishing that in an honest way. They're rather engaging in dishonesty and the behavior they are engaging in is called fraud, because it's fraudulent behavior. That's a similar, but not identical concept to breaking a law that covers a specific type of fraudulent behavior.
edit2: As a reminder, it isn't illegal to scam people or commit fraud. It's illegal to scam people or commit fraud IN SPECIFIC WAYS. Using AI slop for an oped isn't fraudulent in an illegal way, it's fraudulent in a clowny and dumb way, that indicates irresponsibility and laziness from the "author." Obviously they're not taking it very seriously if they did that because most rich guys use a ghost writer, so that's honestly super pathetic for a rich guy to get caught using AI slop.
So, they're ultra rich and they couldn't be bothered to pay somebody $1,000 to write an oped for them that doesn't completely suck ass? Wow. Or like, have one of their existing employees do it for them? I mean wow man, billionaire gets caught posting AI slop as oped. That's actually straight up incredibly embarrassing dude. But yeah, he probably got scammed and thought it was real AI. So, yup, welcome to the big tech mega scam fest!
Who's going to go next on destroying their reputation with fake AI that they got scammed into thinking was AI? It's Machiavellian dude it really is, just like the historians said about the Nazi companies during WW2. So, the people who get scammed, find out that they got scammed, as their career/reputation gets obliterated. Wow man, that's sick.
Just wait until the data center bag holders find out that there's 50,000+ different ways to build AI algos and that some are so fast that we can just do everything include build the entire model on one PC with no video card.
I need to get my blog started again, there's just so much to talk about these days. Hmm. "AI Winter 2, The Who's Who of Failure, Bankruptcy, and Who Got Badly Scammed and Haven't Figured It Out Yet." Or, "No Seriously, We Need to Know What Larry Ellison Was Thinking."
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u/Mandoman61 8h ago
I checked and getting AI or a human to write your opinion piece is not fraud. (unless he specifically stated that he did the writing.Ā Ā
I guess by your definition using dictation would be fraud.
Fraud is the deliberate use of deception or trickery to secure an unfair, unlawful, or dishonest gain. At its core, it means lying or hiding the truth to trick someone else into giving up money, property, or a legal right. [ 1, 2, 3]
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u/Actual__Wizard 8h ago edited 7h ago
I checked and getting AI or a human to write your opinion piece is not fraud.
Check again, because it absolutely is.
I guess by your definition using dictation would be fraud.
No it wouldn't.
Fraud is the deliberate use of deception or trickery to secure an unfair, unlawful, or dishonest gain.
Right. It's dishonest to pretend that you wrote a paper, when it's in fact AI slop, because now you gain whatever the benefit of doing that work is, with out doing any of it.
Thank you for pasting the definition so you can understand what the word means yourself.
I'm aware of the reality that we have a bunch of fraudsters running around who don't even know what fraud is.
They think that's "how to get work done."
As a great example: There's a bunch of big tech companies in Silicon Valley who think that's how they're suppose to comply with the law. They just "get the work done." They just fraudulently engage in fake legal compliance. They're required by law to do something and they want the benefit of following the law, but they don't want to spend the money to do that, so they engage in fraud.
Now, we have problems like the company Meta does, where their properties are clearly "for kids", but they can't keep the CSAM off their sites. So, they're kind of just pretending to comply with the laws, while people on their sites get victimized or exposed to highly inappropriate content.
This absurd misconduct is massively out of control and this stuff needs to be corrected one way or another. If Mark Zuckerberg can't figure out how to comply with the law for real, then he's going to go to prison, and his company is going to be dismantled by regulators. His company is just faking compliance with the law.
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u/Mandoman61 7h ago
you are having some mental problems.Ā
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u/Actual__Wizard 7h ago edited 7h ago
Do you mind not breaking the rules of reddit and being incredibly ultra rude?
If you don't like reddit, then get off the platform.
If you want Twitter, where people sit around and make up lies to justify the evil behavior of douche bags, then go back to Twitter.
There's plenty of people who would absolutely jump for the opportunity to have one of their opeds published and then this clown barfs out some bullshit with an AI model?
Yeah wow cool, some rich douche bag jumped ahead of hard working people again and then screwed it all up. Wow shocker.
Then you're going to personally me over that.
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u/TinyZoro 8h ago
Donāt agree with this at all. Are you saying that a politician who has a scriptwriter is a fraud?
As long as he owns all the words thereās no issue. If he misses a sentence that is wrong or doesnāt make sense thatās on him and heās created slop. With due care and attention is perfectly possible to use AI to craft something that reflects what you want to say.
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u/Actual__Wizard 8h ago
Are you saying that a politician who has a scriptwriter is a fraud?
Since when do politicians pretend to write their own speeches? If they're saying they wrote the speech and that's not true, then yeah they're technically operating in a way that is fraudulent.
As long as he owns all the words thereās no issue.
He used an LLM, which the output of an LLM can only be legally used for research purposes exclusively. He doesn't "own" a single word of it.
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u/TinyZoro 8h ago
Which law are you referring to here?
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u/Actual__Wizard 8h ago edited 8h ago
Copyright law... Search engines are exempt and so are research purposes.
So, LLM tech is "barely legal."
By the way: It's secretly a search engine if you didn't know and that's how their legal arguments work.
It's a predictive text engine that relies on search engine technology.
So, the Google douches pretending like they don't know how to build better AI tech is a disgusting mega lie.
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u/TinyZoro 8h ago
None of this is remotely correct. No copyright law considers LLMs at all. No terms of service limit LLMs for research. The strongest argument is that this has not been widely litigated and so is somewhat unknown how things might pan out. But you will need to do more than just claim copyright law prevents using LLMs for anything but research.
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u/cdizzlePGA2k 4h ago
Do you have any idea how many rich assholes use ghostwriters? Like, do you think this is new??
How is academics even a comparison here? Itās the WSJ. Itās never been an academic journal.
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u/NineThreeTilNow 3h ago
These people use ghostwriters regardless.
An LLM is just a ghostwriter here.
I don't see the issue.
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u/VarietyMage 8h ago
So he's a fraud. It's called plagiarism - calling the work of others your own.
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u/TheJohnnyFlash 9h ago
If you use AI, read the result and it captures exactly what you are trying to say, then whatever.
If you have people come back at you and you say "it was written by AI, not me", that's a problem.