There was a time—a more innocent age—when you could read an op-ed in a major newspaper and confidently say that a human had written it. Hold on to the memory of that for as long as you can.This week, after the billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller published an editorial in The Wall Street Journal criticizing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, his onetime protégé, readers began to notice some familiar tics of AI writing. According to Pangram, the AI-detection tool, the op-ed was 100 percent AI-generated.That in itself was not so shocking. AI writing has regularly snuck into mainstream outlets, and especially newspaper op-ed pages, despite policies against it. Up to now, those accused of passing off a computer’s writing as their own have tended to either apologize or deny it. In April, James Taranto, the Journal’s editorial-features editor, wrote a column comparing Pangram to a “defamation machine” that was fueling unfounded accusations of AI use, including in op-eds he had overseen. “Those of us who practice writing as a professional craft have an ethical duty, and sometimes a contractual obligation, to ensure that our work is original,” he wrote.[Read: The most famous AI writing tic is also the most mysterious]The difference this time is that Druckenmiller owned it. “Of course I used AI,” he told NOTUS on Tuesday. “I’m not embarrassed by it,” he added. “I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.” And rather than rebuke him, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial-page editor, Paul Gigot, defended the practice. “AI is a fact of modern life,” he said in a statement. Last night, Gigot followed up with a full column on the subject, mocking the “media pharisees” who wag their fingers at automated writing. He clarified that the Journal’s opinion staffers must still draft their own columns and editorials but said that he doesn’t intend to police AI use by outside contributors. “Many contributors, especially prominent politicians or CEOs, employ speechwriters or hire a Beltway writing shop,” he wrote. “How different is that from using AI to streamline an essay?”It’s one thing for Druckenmiller to not be embarrassed; plenty of business and tech tycoons are bullish about AI’s utility for writing and just about everything else. “If Stan Druckenmiller isn’t embarrassed,” the venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya posted on X, “you shouldn’t be either.” Valorizing the process of unassisted human writing is “like after matches was invented, still celebrating the arduous time to rub two sticks together,” Palihapitiya added. However, one of America’s most prestigious newspapers welcoming the technology into its pages is unprecedented. Is AI writing entering its post-shame era?Gigot is not wrong that Druckenmiller’s frankness seems almost refreshing in a moment when so much of the writing world is stuck in denial. And his assertion that an AI-composed essay could reflect a human’s authentic ideas is reasonable. I won’t pretend to know enough about bond markets to assess Druckenmiller’s op-ed on its merits. But it seems to have advanced a substantive and non-obvious argument that broadly reflects his views, regardless of who—or what—strung its words together. Op-eds by public figures are rarely authorial master classes anyway.But the notion that Druckenmiller and Gigot deserve points for honesty overlooks their lack of transparency. Before this week, the one thing everyone in the AI-writing debate still seemed to agree on was the importance of disclosure. The Journal’s opinion section appears to have blown past that. Druckenmiller’s op-ed contains no indication that he used AI. In his column, Gigot scoffed at the idea that his readers deserve to know when a piece is chatbot-assisted. “Disclose what?” he asked rhetorically. “Interrogate an author on how precisely he used ChatGPT? I know some publications claim to do this, but I suspect it’s more pro forma than systematic.” (Gigot did not respond to my requests for comment, nor did a spokesperson for Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company. Taranto told me via email that he stands by his April op-ed and believes that Gigot’s statements are consistent with what he wrote.)If the Journal’s higher-ups really believe that their readers don’t care whether an op-ed was written by AI, what would be the harm in letting them know when it is? In fact, studies have found that readers sometimes prefer ChatGPT’s prose or short stories to the human variety—but sour on them when informed about the AI’s involvement. Gigot might conclude from this that people actually like AI writing and just don’t realize it yet. Another interpretation is that people would rather spend their limited time on prose that emanated from another human mind.Perhaps outsourcing an op-ed to a chatbot isn’t materially different from outsourcing it to a ghostwriter. (Although if that’s the case, maybe we should question the practice of ghostwriting before using it to justify AI.) In any circumstance, the Journal’s leap from nuh-uh to so what? feels premature. Yes, many transformative technologies have overcome opposition on their way to broad acceptance, but that doesn’t mean the resistance is a waste of time. It’s part of how society hashes out norms, sets limits, and buys time to adapt. Publishing AI writing under a human byline without telling anyone seems more likely to erode people’s trust in the technology than build it.There’s another reason to keep up the norm of disclosure: When people let a chatbot do their writing—even if they’re guiding and carefully reviewing its work—they might not realize that it’s doing some of their thinking too. Jenna Russell, a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Maryland who has studied AI writing in newspapers, told me that her colleagues’ latest line of inquiry involves “argument collapse.” In a paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed, Maryland researchers found that AI-written essays are far less likely to advance novel points than those written entirely by humans. “These LLMs can start to affect our ideologies without our consciously knowing that it’s happening,” Russell said.Maybe Druckenmiller owning his AI use and receiving the Journal’s blessing heralds a new era of guilt-free mechanized writing. Or maybe it’s just another example of the rich and powerful getting away with something that others can’t. Gigot’s defense of Druckenmiller suggested that his reputation and stature obviated concerns about his use of AI. “His contribution to the public debate was still valuable, and he’s welcome in our pages any time,” Gigot wrote. In contrast, when a previously obscure writer, Mia Ballard, was accused of using AI in her horror novel Shy Girl, her publisher launched an investigation, canceled the book, and left her reputation in shreds.How this plays out for the Journal and the rest of the industry will probably depend, aptly enough, on market forces. If people really are willing to pay for opinions articulated by chatbots, other publications are likely to follow suit. They’ll have no shortage of submissions from writers eager to turn a few prompts into a published op-ed.