# 5 Rules for Better AI Writing — Transcript (2026-08-26)

https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-08-26 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614

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[00:00:00] If you use AI to write an op-ed, does that devalue your thoughts? Believe it or not, that's been maybe the biggest question the AI community has been discussing for the last couple of days

When one of finance's biggest voices dropped an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal critiquing the Treasury Secretary and current monetary policy, he probably didn't think that the big discourse was going to be about how he wrote the op-ed. And yet that's what it was, because the piece you see was very, very clearly written by AI.

People reacted like it was some big scandal, except then both the famous financier and the opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal said, "Yeah, of course he used AI." So if we now live in a world where AI writing is totally normal, how can we make it actually good?

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Believe

Believe it or not, one of the biggest conversations around AI for the last couple of days has been around AI writing



Specifically the legitimacy of it, disclosures around it and and how all of those things might be changing. The The specific context for this



Was an op-ed, published in The Wall Street Journal by investor Stanley Druckenmiller

The op-ed called Let the Bond Market Speak was a fairly full-throated critique of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent



Now Now I'm not going to get into the substance-- of Druckenmiller's specific argument, as that's a totally different show than this one



But the things that are worth, noting [00:02:00] are one, That Druckenmiller has a legendary status among finance folks



Among other achievements, running a hedge fund that had zero losing years between 1981 and 2010, which is completely unprecedented before or afterwards

And two



That the focus of this piece is not some secondary or tertiary topic

But cuts to the quick of, macroeconomic policy right now

In other words, the op-ed from a substance perspective at least matters

And And yet extremely quickly

The substance was not what people were talking about

Instead it was the fact



That the piece is replete with just about every egregious AI-ism That exists today



It is, for example, full of it's not this, it's that. If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear, that isn't a crisis, it's an invoice

This This wasn't liquidity management, it was price management, and a mistake far larger than four billion suggests



AI detectors like Pangram quickly identified the chance that it was AI generated at 100%

And some folks were not happy JB on X writes, " [00:03:00] I don't understand how people sniff this out as AI. I mean, apart from running it through Pangram. Why would Druckenmiller put his name on AI slop? he's fine with doing that even though theseallegedly aren't his words?"

Neil Seibert writes Why did the Wall Street Journal not disclose that Druckenmiller used AI to write his piece? Such disclosures should be mandatory

Widely followed markets commentator Jesse Livermore writes, " Presenting AI slop as if it were your own writing is plagiarism, full stop. You're You're taking credit for words and phrases you did not write."



So So Druckenmiller, having been caught out admitted sheepishly that yes, indeed, he had used AI 

and apologized and said he'd do better next time, right? Wrong His response instead was, " Bro, of course I used AI

In addition to the literal line, "Of course I used AI," Druckenmiller added, " There's a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major. I'm not embarrassed by it. I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems."



And 

Wall Street opinion, editor Paul Gigot backed Druckenmiller up

With Gigot saying, " AI is a fact of [00:04:00] modern life. People will use it to assist their work and their writing, including with research, checking grammar, editing, and more. The question for us is whether what we publish from contributors reflects an author's original argument, and if the author has the standing and credibility to make it.

In Stan Druckenmiller's case, we have had a relationship with him for many years, and no one can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion So So clear as day here

The journal's op-ed position is that what matters is the sincerity of the ideas, not 

the unique human flavor of the words used to express them

them And And from there and while some of the critiquers might have been pretty loud, there were also a lot of folks pointing out this wasn't all that different from how leading figures had done op-eds for quite some time Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal wrote, " "Prior Prior to AI, there were plenty of high-profile people publishing op-eds under their own name that were entirely written by some underling, and I don't think there was much controversy about it."

Validating that, journalist Sharon Goldman writes, " From 2015 to 2020, I wrote dozens of op-eds for top executives that ran in tech or trade publications. It was common [00:05:00] practice, and I never received or wanted a byline/credit. It was a decent gig for a freelance writer who had to do lots of types of work to pay the bills.

I usually had one conversation with the executive as well as some notes."



Others Others picked up on Druckenmiller's argument that effectively this was just a tool



Reflecting on Druckenmiller saying that of course he used AI, investor Scott Phillips wrote, " Good. Can you imagine having to apologize for using a typewriter or a computer or the internet for research rather than encyclopedias? AI is here to stay.

We should be asking why people aren't using it, not criticizing them for doing so



When When All In's Jason Calacanis wrote, " " If you write a public piece with AI, you should disclose that in the first sentence. AI wrote this for me. Unforgivable for a public figure to publish an AI-written piece without a clear disclosure in the first sentence.

Undermines the entire premise of publishing a thought piece because we can't tell what's yours and what's the magic black box's thoughts



However, his co-host, Chamath Palihapitiya, bit back. " This is a dumb new form of virtue signaling. Do you disclose every article you've ever read that gives you an opinion when you spout off on X? No. This is how AI also works. He might as well disclaim the entire internet and every written [00:06:00] word.

If he puts his name behind it, it's his opinion."



Separately, Chamath also posted, " " If Stan Druckenmiller isn't embarrassed to be a meat proxy, you shouldn't be either. it's like after matches was invented, still celebrating the arduous time to rub two sticks together. Dumb



even Even simpler, investor Andrew Steinwald wrote, people getting mad at others for writing with AI is boomer coded. In like two years, no one will care if you use AI or not."

Pointing out where value is shifting, Aria Deniz writes, " " Who cares if Druckenmiller used AI to help articulate his thoughts? AI is a tool. If If it helps an investor take decades of experience, judgment, and pattern recognition and articulate those thoughts more clearly, that's a good thing. The value is in the thinking.

Get used to it

to it But But for others, this was a much more nuanced conversation. Spectra Markets' Brent Donnelly wrote, " The AI writing debate comes down to one question: Is writing art, or is it a functional communication tool like code? This is like asking if a car is to get from A to B or for excitement and good times.

It's just a personal thing. to me, writing, even nonfiction, is art, and cars are for fun. But many don't agree. [00:07:00] There's no right answer."



David McMahon wrote, " There's a legitimate debate here, and Druckenmiller is a smart guy. I have no doubt the AI-written editorial reflected his actual thinking. But too many people are using AI as a substitute for serious thinking. Just look at the epidemic of reply guys on this site flooding posts with AI-generated garbage.

That type of use deserves nothing but mockery



going Going deeper on the idea that part of the problem was not AI writing in general, but AI writing for op-eds, Dirty Texas Hedge posted, " what what Drock and Jai Go say is 100% true descriptively.

The problem is not that they're wrong. The problem is that it represents an expression of contempt of the format of an op-ed and of its audience



And others started to reach for whether there was some variance here. That AI writing might be good for some things, but not for others

CNBC's Deirdre Bosa wrote, " I think about this often but can't remember who said it. AI is great for the middle. Beginning needs a human. What's the idea and what are you actually trying to say or build? Middle, let AI research, organize, draft, rewrite, tighten, poke holes in it. End needs to be human, too.

Is this any good? True? Do I buy it?"

I think that Druckenmiller didn't [00:08:00] do the end part as well as he could have. have.now for now for completeness, the thought that she was referencing came from Balaji who back in June of 2025 posted, " AI doesn't do end-to-end. It does middle-to-middle.

The new bottlenecks are prompting and verifying

So with all of this in mind, and as someone who's thought about this quite a bit, I wanted to put together kind of a crib sheet on how I think about AI Writing 

For the sake of a catchy podcast title, it is called Five Rules for AI Writing



And in addition, to those maxims, I also wanna share about how I think about writing in a few different specific contexts

foundation So the foundation for all of this

is that I tend to agree that AI writing is now a fact of life

If If you need any evidence of this, just just go look at OpenAI's recently released enterprise data about how users are using ChatGPT. the preponderance of it across almost every department is writing And that's not just for comms, that's for recruiting, marketing, customer support, legal, sales, policy, you name it

AI writing is here and it's here to stay. But But that doesn't mean that all AI writing is the same. In fact, rule number one for me is that different types [00:09:00] of writing mean different types of rules. An email is not the same as a strategy memo. A strategy memo is not the same as a post on LinkedIn A post on LinkedIn is not 

the same as an op-ed

These different types of writing are trying to achieve different things, and the way that we engage with AI around those writings will consequently be different

My next maxim of AI writing is is that I also agree that this purity test sort of phase



will, go the way of the dodo



I think the folks who are saying, that this conversation is going to be quaint in a couple of years are frankly probably right. But if the purity test will go, I think the quality test won't In fact, I think if anything

The increased easiness of the inputs of writing will increase the burden on the outputs of writing even more I don't think that just because people start to accept that people are using AI to write means that they'll accept bad writing as a consequence

To get specific on that is Maxim three



For most people, quality is corresponding with effort or the perception of effort, and effort or its absence tends to be pretty obvious



I think a lot of the negative response to Druckenmiller's op-ed

[00:10:00] was that the AI-isms were so glaring and so fixable



That it seemed like he didn't even care, to take the time to change the syntax on a couple of sentences. And if he didn't care to take that time, do we really think that he put all that much thought into the point that he's trying to make?

In that case, I think we have an example of people's perception of lack of effort on the writing itself



being more broadly, expressing of a lack of effort in the construction of the argument underneath



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Maxim four, and Ithink this one will be most acutely felt among enterprise listeners. When it comes to AI writing, longer is not better, and in fact, usually the opposite is true

The reason we have phrases like work slop now

is that a lot of the AI models that we've used over the last couple of years have been much better at saying a lot than saying the right thing succinctly And what's funny is that although this problem has been greatly exacerbated by the rise of AI writing

Great writers have always known this to be true. there's there's a famous quote from Blaise Pascal in the 17th century that has been cribbed and updated [00:14:00] by many authors since, where in a letter he wrote, " I've made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."

The first wave of AI writing was defined By endlessly long eye-bleeding length documents The next generation will not be

And lastly, maxim five. As so many people have pointed out

In so many cases, writing is thinking The process of deciding what your thesis is, what the supporting arguments are

Narrative construction Even considering the impact of a turn of phrase

These are exercises whose main point is ultimately not the words that end up on the page, but the substance of the argument that runs underneath them

That does not mean a priori that using AI for writing means outsourcing your thinking, but it is the constant risk that needs to hover in your field of view when you are using AI writing because it is so easy to fall into



and I say this with absolutely no judgment



One of the places that I feel this tension is when I'm ideating on a new concept for an episode like this one



I could have very easily told [00:15:00] Claude or ChatGPT, "I wanna do an episode called Five Rules of AI Writing." and I know a couple of the rules, like writing is thinking 

but you take and run with that idea and build me the asset that I can talk over in the show



That would have been a much faster process. than what I did, which is sitting in Notion and actually thinking through each of these five, debating with myself around whether I wanted it to be six or whether I wanted to consider that first one just the foundations



But for this particular, context

The more manual approach was the right one. Which gets us to a crib sheet for the burden on different types of writing. Remember, maxim one is different types of writing, different types of rules

And what that means is can or should AI write this is probably in most cases the wrong question



So let's talk about a few different examples



Starting with some of the most obvious, like emails

Emails Emails are pretty clearly safe for AI

In that, for the vast, vast majority of emails, no one has ever judged them on the quality of the prose



And while yes, there could be the risk of outsourcing your thinking with email writing, emails tend to focus on such small, concise units of thought that the risk that any of our inherent [00:16:00] tendency towards intellectual outsourcing becomes,prominent gets reduced

That said, I think in general, we're moving to a world 

we're using AI for emails might be in many cases overkill. Now, maybe there are some times where it makes sense. For example, we have a standard response email for sponsorship requests that come through. but but for interactive emails, the type of things that you might otherwise be doing via Slack or a messaging app, I tend to think that other ways of speeding up your process, like just dictating with something like Whisperflow, are going to be even more effective than using AI Next Next up, let's talk about meeting notes summary, another extraordinarily common use of AI writing This once again is very safe for AI Because in many ways, this isn't even really writing.

It's about compression. It's about taking a bunch of other words and turning them into something succinct Still, there is an AI failure mode even with meeting notes

which is the AI being too exhaustive

An AI that was sitting in a meeting and listened for 60 minutes and has the transcript of everything that everyone said is probably going to be very good at summarizing what everyone said, but might not be as good as you as explaining the most [00:17:00] important things that anyone said

And so I think even if you can outsource the vast majority of meeting note summarization and things like that to AI, it's worth coming in over the top with your clarification of the one or two things that are actually important as a complement to what it produces.

What about an internal strategy memo? This I think can be sneakily bad for AI, although certainly you can use AI to assist. On the one hand, it seems like this would be a great area for AI



Because it's another, one where the strength of the prose doesn't really matter that much

That said, this is a great example of where that fifth maxim that writing is thinking comes in

If an AI is tasked with writing some internal strategy memo, unless you are hyper-precise about exactly the strategy that it is communicating and the things that it is meant not to communicate, it is very, very easy for AI to go off the rails and add its own additions



Or simply to provide, bad thinking in the form of generic advice that is based on its set of training data rather than the specific context of your actual organization



what What that means is that, internal strategy type writing is a great [00:18:00] example of, I think, the middle that Deirdre was talking about. you're going to want to, on a personal level, exhaustively think through the strategy.

And you might even wanna think about your interaction with AI on two totally different levels. the first is using AI to support that thinking, bulleting, outlining, iteration, and then the final writing as an entirely separate process

I think if the outline is tight and contains all of that thinking effort, it will often be totally fine to let AI write the actual words Now, what about a very common use case in social media copy?

This one is interestingly mixed. On the one hand, I think that AI does a fine job on a lot of social copy, especially if you have tuned it away from the most egregious AI-isms like it's not this, it's that, the self-congratulation And other things that are just gonna be glaring and distract people from whatever it is that you're trying to say



it, I think in general it, does better the shorter the medium is. In other words, AI is probably gonna have an easier time with an old-school single-line post on X than it is with a full LinkedIn essay because that full LinkedIn essay just has more room for its AI-isms to shine through



The bigger [00:19:00] problem with, AI writing for social media is that to the extent that it ever did, social media no longersimply rewards pithy writing. In fact, social media demands engagement.



it wants posters not just automating their posting to provide more content into the maw. it wants those same posters and commenting on other people's posts, and generally providing engagement The sweet, sweet human signal that allows those platforms to serve ads because you spend more time on the platform



I think the way to do, AI writing better for social media then is two parts. First, the more time you're willing to take to invest up front to tune the voice, The better your results are going to be even with the AI written part. the second part is simply to appreciate that AI writing, no matter how tuned it is, is only going to get you so far with social media

And And this is one where I feel it acutely



as As I've now built a full pipeline from the disaggregation of each episode that ends up on the aidailybrief.ai website to a set of generated posts that go to Twitter and LinkedIn

It has been valuable. It's increased sharing. It's done a lot of the things that I wanted it to do [00:20:00] for social, especially considering I was doing exactly zero social before



But within weeks, so clearly slammed up against the walls of how much it can do for the AI Daily Brief on social media media so in some ways, the lesson of AI writing here is to just have realistic expectations

Two more to focus on before we get out of here First marketing copy and then we'll end with op-eds given that that's where the conversation started I have found AI writing with marketing copy to be annoyingly bad. I say annoyingly bad because this is one of the areas where I want it to be good

Even as someone who obsesses over the words on the websites that describe my projects. I want it to be good enough to allow me to not do that sort of obsessing

And yet marketing is the area where I find the most egregious AI-isms turn up. Maybe it's because marketing is an area where you want uniqueness and distinction, not sameness and commonality. And so the cost of those common AI-isms is even higher than in other contexts 

I also find there are some specifically bad things that AI does when it comes to marketing copy, even as you are interacting with it

The [00:21:00] one that I run across most often is when I give the model a correction. For example, something like, "Stop presuming so much about the reader," it tends to turn that correction itself into copy So I'll look at the next version and find some headline somewhere that says, "We assume nothing about the reader."

It drives me absolutely batty, and it happens all the time. So So when it comes to how to make AI writing better for marketing copy, my short answer unfortunately, is that I genuinely haven't been able to. How I would try, however, if I had to really dig down on this, would be to extensively provide as many examples of past on-brand writing, as well as as many examples as possible of what I like and don't like for my brand specifically to the AI to try to tune it

At least a little bit better



Still, I think for me right now

A better use of AI for marketing copy is as a rapid iterator. For example, if I'm trying to figure out a tagline that I really like, asking AI to come up with 20 is a really great way to spark something for myself

Lastly, on op-eds and convincing essays



remember Remember what Texas [00:22:00] Hedge wrote about the, Druckenmiller piece He said the problem is that it represents an expression of contempt of the format of an op-ed and of its audience the, and this I think gets to the maxims about effort.

The whole point of an op-ed is to convince someone of something. When readers can more or less instantly tell it was low effort, they inherently switch off. If you couldn't be bothered to take the time to make your argument convincingly, why should I care about your argument?

As I said, no one actually cared, I don't think, about the quality of the writing in Druckenmiller's op-ed. the issue was that the perceived laziness of it in their estimation, reduce the strength of the underlying argument



And this is perhaps the easiest example, of thinking is writing. You just gotta do the thinking first of-- When you're trying to convince someone of something, you have to get extremely clear on both the thesis and the supporting points

before you turn it over to AI. This is the five-paragraph essay from grade school, baby. You just gotta do it

And to complete the effort sandwich, after you have turned it over to the AI, go through and make sure it doesn't have those,incredibly obvious AI-isms



writing-- [00:23:00] To sum up, AI writing is not going anywhere, and I think it will unlock a lot of opportunity. People who haven't used writing for communication before will start to



What it won't change, is that laziness in work comes across as laziness in work



There are no shortcuts ultimately for doing things well. wait-- even if we can make great use of new tools

that help us do that well, faster and better. For now, that's gonna do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace 

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