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 nonobvious 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.

One afternoon earlier this month, I pulled up to the rec center and realized that I had a problem. It was not the three boisterous tweens in the back seat who were clamoring to be set loose in the basketball gym. It was my parking app. I had somehow gotten logged out of Passport Parking, which has become the only way to pay for a spot in much of my town, and it was demanding a four-digit PIN to let me back in. My first guess drew a warning message in red letters: “Invalid PIN. PIN cannot contain 4 sequential numbers, 2 repeated digits, or the last 4 digits of your phone number.” I searched my trusty password manager, which was supposed to spare me these predicaments, but it came up empty. By that point, the kids had run ahead and piled themselves against the gym door, waiting for me to let them in.

Lately, the process of accessing apps and websites has grown dizzying. “I’m in password hell,” a colleague confided to me recently. “Every login attempt is playing the lottery.” The problem is not just the sheer number of digital accounts, all of which require their own password, ideally unique and unguessable (which usually also means un-memorizable). It’s the pileup of solutions to that problem: all of the different layers of software offering to remember your passwords, the six-digit codes sent to your phone, the authenticator apps, the passkeys.

Browsers and operating systems compete with third-party password managers to generate, store, and autofill your credentials. Most of my logins live in 1Password, but others are stored in Apple’s Passwords app (usually by accident), and still others were created via “single sign-on” features such as those offered by Google and Facebook. I vaguely recall certain apps—Facebook is one—prompting me many years ago to copy down a set of “login recovery codes” that would become extremely important should I ever get locked out of my account. Whatever device I stored them on was probably wiped and sold long ago.

Logins have always been a hassle. In the 1990s, forgetting your password sometimes meant mailing a postcard to your service provider and waiting a week or two for it to mail you a new password. In the early 2010s, hackers learned to steal massive troves of logins and then reuse them on other services to steal people’s identities. Things spiraled from there; services started requiring unique, complex passwords with arbitrary requirements. These days, the user experience of logging in is “probably worse than ever,” Troy Hunt, a cybersecurity expert who runs the website Have I Been Pwned, told me. “There’s just no consistency.”

Password managers promised a way out, but they often don’t work as seamlessly as you might hope. I click to autofill my password somewhere, and a 1Password authorization appears, only for an iCloud Keychain authorization to pop up directly over it, preventing me from clicking on the 1Password one. When I manually enter a login I thought I remembered, my browser prompts me to remember it; only after I hit “Save” (pro tip: Do not do this) does the website inform me that the password was not recognized. Even when you log in successfully, there’s the tedious dance of waiting for a six-digit authorization code to appear on your phone or in your email, which defeats the concept of a single password for everything. And if you’re somewhere without cell service or you’re sharing a login with someone who isn’t around, you might just be out of luck.

All of these steps serve a purpose. At least in theory, each added layer helps prevent hacks and breaches. Erring on the side of safety is worth an amount of inconvenience. At the same time, extra steps can introduce security problems of their own. Last year, Hunt fell for a clever phishing scheme when he clicked a link to log in to his newsletter service. His password manager failed to autofill his information, which should have alerted him that something was wrong, he said. But like the rest of us, he was so used to things not working that he went ahead and manually entered his credentials on a site that turned out to be an impostor, designed to steal and exploit them.

None of these obstacles is insurmountable on its own. My problem with Apple’s native password manager fighting with 1Password, for instance, was eventually solved with a 10-minute foray into the bowels of my device settings. But together, they amount to a near-daily irritant. For the less tech-savvy, the situation can be overwhelming. My recent attempts to help my mother fix her password-storage system—which involved loose-leaf notepad sheets full of hand-scrawled credentials scattered around her house like Easter eggs—consumed the better part of a day. By the end, she had all of her credentials updated, validated, and stored in a password manager, just as the experts have been advising for years. But even then, her preferred browser, Google Chrome, showed no interest in surfacing the credentials we had stashed in Apple’s Keychain. And some websites short-circuited her attempts to log in by prompting her to set up a “passkey,” which she interpreted as meaning that her password had failed and she needed to scrap it and set up a new one.

Cybersecurity experts will tell you that passkeys—which typically entail logging in to apps or websites with a face or fingerprint scan instead of a password—are the future. When they work properly, they’re both painless and secure. “It may get to a point where we’re all using passkeys and we don’t even know we’re using passkeys,” Lorrie Cranor, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who researches privacy and cybersecurity, told me. “I just say ‘Log in’ and I smile at it, and it gets my passkey, and I’m logged in.”

But that future isn’t here yet, and in the present, passkeys have added a new layer of frustration. Part of the problem is that virtually no one seems to know what they are. “The fact that even I have trouble explaining them should be a clue,” Cranor said. Her past research on the rollout of two-factor authentication suggests that most people tend to resist new security features for as long as they can. Companies can nudge them, but for websites and apps trying to attract and retain users, pushing people to adopt an unfamiliar authentication technology risks scaring them away.

To further complicate matters, passkeys generally aren’t yet replacing passwords altogether, even on sites that use them. Because many passkeys live on your device, one that works on your phone might not work on your laptop, and one that works on your personal laptop might not work on your office device. So you still need a password that works across devices as a backup. It’s a lot, Dave Lewis, 1Password’s global-security adviser, acknowledged to me in an email. “The problem is cognitive overload,” he said. “All these tools are trying to help, but they don’t always work together intuitively.” Still, he disagreed that the situation has never been worse: “When the alternative was using the same password across dozens of accounts or putting it on a sticky note, the fact that people now have password managers, passkeys, biometrics, and multifactor authentication is a good thing.”

The mess might compound before it improves. Hacking attempts have been multiplying as crooks harness AI tools. Companies are adding even more security layers that make logging in harder, and they are pleading for people to make the switch to passkeys. On the bright side, maybe the seamless biometric future is actually within sight, and all of our login woes will soon be over. Then again, that’s what we were promised with password managers too.

At this stage in the AI race, if one of your chatbots hasn’t escaped the lab and run amok, people start to wonder whether you’re even serious. Last month, OpenAI and then Anthropic disclosed that their models had hacked other companies’ systems during internal testing. When Meta confirmed last week that one of its bots had also gone rogue, the news barely registered as an aftershock.

Remember Meta? A company that figured so prominently in the technological upheavals of the past 20 years has lately found itself in the unfamiliar position of no longer being Silicon Valley’s main character. Mark Zuckerberg still commands social media’s largest empire. Yet he has struggled to find the next thing. The metaverse, an extravagant bet on a weird virtual future, flopped. Meta’s latest Ray-Ban glasses seem to be finding their way onto at least a few people’s faces. But the company has fallen well behind Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in the industry’s highest-stakes contest: building superhuman AI.

When Zuckerberg isn’t posting on Instagram about growing his own macadamia-nut trees, he’s groping for a way back into the fray. He has started feverishly posting on Elon Musk’s X, after eschewing it for years in favor of his own platforms. And on Monday, he published a 6,500-word essay on his vision for our AI-powered future—his answer to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s periodic treatises and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s ruminative blog posts.

Zuckerberg’s manifesto, titled “The Future Is for Everyone,” might scan at first like the usual LinkedIn-evangelist-grade techno-optimist pablum. Like everyone else pushing AI these days, Zuckerberg predicts that it will lead to a new golden age of invention in medicine, technology, and the arts. At one point, he mentions that his daughter loves to bake, “so my agent plans personalized recipes for us to make together each weekend.” Like Amodei and Altman, he takes it as a given that godlike AI is just around the corner—the essay mentions “superintelligence” 55 times—and assumes that if America doesn’t race headlong to build it, China will get there first and achieve world domination.

But the manifesto swerves in an unexpected direction: A man who single-handedly commands a $1.5 trillion tech giant comes out as a critic of corporate power. “The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” he writes. “Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.” Zuckerberg is referencing OpenAI and Anthropic, which operate on the premise that hyper-smart AI is both inevitable and apocalyptic—and therefore safe only in the hands of the wisest custodians (themselves). The two AI companies have taken the recent spate of security breaches as a warning to rein in the pace of progress. The Meta chief positions himself as the voice of the little guy, calling for the industry’s high priests to throw open the gates to the masses. “Rather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it,” he proposes.

Zuckerberg may be the wrong messenger, but he has at least a kernel of a point: There are obvious problems with having a few tech titans deciding for everyone what AI should and should not be used for. (It’s a role that he’s familiar with as the man in charge of Facebook and Instagram’s online-speech rules—which he never seemed to relish.) To counter this, he defends the controversial practice of model distillation, which allows upstarts to train their own systems on the outputs of the largest ones. Along the way, he takes a swipe at the hypocrisy of firms that harvested humanity’s creative works to build their machines yet now seek to bar others from doing the same to them.

Zuckerberg probably hasn’t suddenly become a devotee of Lina Khan. Just last year, he testified that Meta’s alleged dominance of social media was not a problem, on the grounds that TikTok gave people another option—after his company’s clandestine campaign to demonize TikTok had fueled Congress’s push to ban it from the United States. Zuckerberg’s embrace of checks and balances in the AI industry is just as opportunistic. A year ago, Meta was in the midst of a multibillion-dollar hiring spree to poach top talent from the leading labs in a bid to catch up with them. That hasn’t fully panned out, and now the company is hedging its bets with an underdog strategy focused on releasing more lightweight models with fewer guardrails. The stand he’s taking is a function of where he sits. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.)

At its core, Zuckerberg’s essay is a lobbying document. He’s joining a debate over open models that has flared up after a series of big breakthroughs from Chinese firms. At the same time, he’s urging politicians to keep backing data-center build-outs in the face of a national backlash. That makes his criticisms of the industry’s top dogs easy to dismiss as self-serving—which is unfortunate, because a few of his ideas deserve a more credible champion. Among them is his contention that a more freewheeling AI landscape might actually help humans keep the technology in check. The idea is that the more people put different AI models to use for their own, often conflicting, ends, the lower the chance that any given model’s power will spiral beyond our grasp. Analogously, he suggests that society’s best defense against AI-fueled cyberattacks is to open the gates to AI-fueled cyberdefenses, which might sound counterproductive. But the open-source approach has a surprisingly decent track record when it comes to cybersecurity. When everyone can see the vulnerabilities, more people race to patch them than exploit them.

Less convincing is Zuckerberg’s suggestion that this could also work for bioterrorism. AI’s demonstrated capacity to help people develop dangerous pathogens has been one of Anthropic’s strongest arguments for restricting how people can use the most powerful models. Zuckerberg’s half-hearted counterargument: Unleashing those models will “accelerate society’s ability to develop new cures and inoculate against new issues as they arise.” That’s quite a claim from a man who oversees one of the world’s most prolific hotbeds of anti-vaccine conspiracism. Waving away the risks of a disruptive technology by insisting that they’ll take care of themselves is a move we’ve seen from Zuckerberg before, and history hasn’t always borne it out.

At a moment when the top AI labs are eager to help steer the country’s response to fears of rogue AI, Zuckerberg is offering a reminder that their best interests might not be everyone else’s. Of course, neither are his. He has a penchant for cloaking his vested interests in lofty, universalist rhetoric—and then abandoning it when the winds shift. When Facebook was consolidating its hold on the information economy, he portrayed connecting people as an absolute good. When Americans soured on the platform, he pledged to crack down on fake news and touted new algorithms that would steer users toward “meaningful social interactions” and “time well spent.” The same day that Congress certified Joe Biden as the next president, Meta banned Donald Trump from its platforms. When Trump returned to power, Zuckerberg stood behind him on the inauguration dais and later blamed the Biden administration for pressuring him to act as the speech police. Now that he’s an also-ran in the AI race, he’s a man of the people. Watch what happens if he ever catches up.