By Steven Levy
Publication Date: 2026-04-17 15:46:00
Sportswriting legend Red Smith once said that writing a column was easy: “You just sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” However, blood is not required in 2026. You just sit down at a laptop and let Claude or ChatGPT write the story for you.
That seems to be the finding from a number of recent journalistic reports. Last month, my colleague Maxwell Zeff wrote about authors who unapologetically generate at least some of their prose via unmentioned AI collaborators. The star of his article was Alex Heath, a tech reporter who said he routinely has AI drafts written based on his notes, interview transcripts and emails. That same week, The Wall Street Journal profiled Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg, who told the newspaper that he relies heavily on AI in his work. Since July he has written 600 stories; One day last February he had seven bylines.
Since reading these reports – which fortunately were written by human hands – I have…
