When the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Stanley Druckenmiller that was written with AI, the backlash treated it as a category violation. Paul Gigot, the Journal’s opinion editor, answered the obvious way: prominent politicians and CEOs have always used speechwriters — how different is using AI to streamline an essay? Ryan Jacobs, a speechwriter for fifteen years (Janet Yellen’s, among others), thinks Gigot is right, and says so from inside the trade. The moral panic rests on a naive assumption that everyone contains a hidden Hemingway who just needs time, a blank page, and discipline. “To do otherwise is loser behaviour. This is a bonkers, elitist vision of the writing world.”
The speechwriter’s real job, Jacobs argues, was never the prose. It is the hour-long interview that finds the throughline a client can’t see — his own example: a Xerox-adjacent engineer whose father played violin in a Berlin chamber group with Einstein, which became a commencement speech about finding inspiration “at the intersection of things.” The value happens before a single word is written. That is the genuine promise of writing with AI: democratising editorial firepower that used to cost $15,000 an op-ed.
The current tools fall short of the promise. They are “sycophants with a large vocabulary” — post-trained to be agreeable, useless at the argumentative interrogation that draws a real piece out of a person. And the anti-AI cottage industry is worse: Claude’s watermarking and Pangram’s AI-writing scores are “scolds in the form of software” that tell you you’re cheating without showing you what better writing looks like. Neither interrogates the person; they interrogate the page.
Jacobs reaches for the agriculture analogy — Harari’s “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us,” a line he notes reads exactly like AI, and nobody should care — to name the real risk: the tool that expands our capacity to produce writing can constrain our ability to put thought behind it. “A world of more, but emptier, words.” Speechwriter-shaped software is emerging slowly (a Columbia professor’s program that debates students instead of answering them; Jacobs’ own on-ice word processor), but nobody has cracked the interview yet. He hopes someone does — “if my semi-obsolescence is the price of a world that thinks deeper and writes better, so be it.”