Time for some ground rules for AI and writing

Richard J. Tofel

There seems to be an increasing amount of heat, and precious little light, surrounding the issue of using AI to write. This week, I want to see if we can get past that, and begin to move toward a set of workable ground rules, for journalism and beyond.

First, some examples of the sorts of things that are happening in the absence of such ground rules:

• The Financial Times appended a note to a piece by a Harvard Kennedy School professor because he had broken its rules by using AI to condense his own work. Violating a publication’s rules (assuming you know them) is surely bad, but does a rule forbidding using AI to condense something you have written yourself really make sense? Microsoft Word has long challenged some sentence structures. Should heeding it have been barred? If not, what’s the difference?

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