Two professors recently acknowledged using generative AI to help write opinion pieces for major publications, raising questions about the standards faculty should follow in their public writing - especially when students are expected to avoid the same tools.
The Financial Times added an addendum to a guest essay published August 13, disclosing that its author, Ricardo Hausmann, a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of Harvard's Growth Lab, had used AI to "condense" his piece condemning President Trump's tariffs, in violation of the outlet's policy. The Financial Times is conducting an "editorial review process" to evaluate the piece in more detail, a spokesperson said in a statement. Hausmann said in an email that he hadn't been aware of the policy when writing the article, adding that he believes AI is becoming too common for policies like that to exist.
On Tuesday, The Daily Californian reported that Zvezdelina Stankova, a teaching professor in the math department at the University of California at Berkeley, had used AI to edit an August 15 San Francisco Standard opinion article. The piece argued that the UC system was admitting underqualified students because it doesn't consider standardized testing, and cited the fact that some students use AI to write admissions essays as a reason to bring back such requirements. A spokesperson for The Standard said in a statement that it allows AI use to assist with writing, but expects that "humans are behind every article." The piece reflects Stankova and her colleagues' "original analysis, research, and expertise," the spokesperson added.
Hausmann violated the outlet's guidelines; Stankova didn't. But beyond a newspaper's code of conduct, what ethical responsibility - if any - do professors have when it comes to AI in their public-facing work?
Double standards in academia
"What's been happening is there's been a sense that students are cheating, and they will be punished, but then, Oh wait, why are faculty allowed to, or even sometimes encouraged, to use these things?" said Christopher Schaberg, director of public scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis. "That issue is now being forced to the fore."
Hausmann questioned in his email why faculty wouldn't be allowed to use AI in their writing, especially if the technology made the writing better. He pointed out that word-processing tools have long corrected spelling and grammar, which isn't seen as problematic. AI, he said, is another step in that direction.
"The issue is whether the use of AI produces better ideas, or a cleaner written text that communicates those ideas better. If so, use of AI should be encouraged rather than discouraged," said Hausmann, a professor of the practice of international political economy. "The FT uses human editors to sharpen and shorten submitted draft op-eds, without changing the authorship of the person who sent them in. If this were done by AI, how would the outcome be different? How would it be worse? What is the harm that the policy is trying to prevent?"
Stankova said in an interview that she used AI as a "word processor" and a "partial wordsmithing tool" for the essay, but declined to comment on the specific functions she used, citing concerns that they would be "misinterpreted by the public." The ideas in the article, she said, came from humans.
"I would be completely fine with the idea to write that AI is a co-editor, but it did not contribute to any ideas," Stankova said. "And you know why? Because this op-ed, for me, is not an opportunity to gain fame, to gain recognition. This is not a literary piece for me. This is a way to disseminate information, to disseminate the core arguments there."
Stankova said using AI to edit has been helpful for her and two of her colleagues, who aren't native English speakers. The team has also used it for research. "If someone told me, 'Don't use AI on the op-ed,' well, we would have spent many months, if not years, trying to get where we are," she said on the tool's ability to gather information.
Editing is writing
But to David Perry, associate director of undergraduate studies in the history department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the author of a book on public scholarship, using AI to "edit" or "condense" is synonymous with using it to write. Cutting down an article or generalizing it for a broader audience is "what writing and thinking is about," he added.
"Writing complicated things that are accessible to a public audience and that are short enough for public-audience attention spans is hard - it is harder, in many ways, than writing at length and writing only for your 20 most compatible colleagues," Perry said. "It's just a practice. You have to decide to put in the work."
The work of being an academic, Perry said, is to make complicated things coherent. Michael Socolow, chair of the communications and journalism department at the University of Maine at Orono, agreed, calling it a "cop-out" for a writer to say they "only" used AI for the basic mechanics of composition. He added that he's concerned about what senior academics model for both junior academics and their students when using AI.
Internet sleuths on X were the first to correctly suggest that Hausmann's op-ed was assisted by AI. Pangram, an advanced AI-detection program, has made it easier to catch: One 2025 study from the University of Chicago found that the tool was nearly flawless in catching AI use. X users put Hausmann's article into Pangram, which said it found AI writing in more than 70 percent of the piece.
The Daily Californian reported that Pangram detected AI use in 33 percent of Stankova's essay. (A professor who studies how AI affects reading told the newspaper he didn't think that score "meant much.")
Stankova said she's now worried that public backlash for her use of AI is turning attention away from her and her colleagues' push to reinstate standardized testing at the University of California. While Perry said he doesn't believe in social-media pile-ons, he said it's important to recognize that public writing often leads to a public response.
Schaberg, of WashU, said he wasn't particularly surprised by either instance of AI use, and added that he expects to see situations like these become "ubiquitous to the point that it's not remarkable."
"We'll probably see some extreme examples that are scandalous, but as more and more scholars integrate these tools into their workflows, it's just going to become less alarming," he said.
Why this matters for writers
For professional writers, these cases draw a practical line worth studying: the difference between using AI as a tool and using it as a ghostwriter is harder to define than many outlets' policies suggest. The professors' defenses - that AI only "condensed" or "wordsmithed" their work - echo arguments writers will increasingly face from editors, clients, and their own consciences. The emerging standard, based on these cases, is that transparency matters more than the specific tool used. Writers who disclose their AI use and can articulate exactly what the tool did - and didn't do - will have an easier time defending their work than those who let detection software reveal it for them. For more on how writers are navigating these questions, see AI for Writers and Generative AI and LLM resources.
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