The Journal's foray into automated opinion journalism has sparked predictable outrage from the creative class. But setting aside the hand-wringing over labor, we must admit that the algorithm is simply much better company.
When the Wall Street Journal published its now-infamous op-ed entirely authored by a chatbot, my timeline immediately descended into the predictable, performative outrage we have come to expect from the digital working class. Freelance journalists and union organizers were quoting the piece with digital pitchforks, mourning the supposed death of human insight and the collapse of the editorial profession. But reading through the algorithm's perfectly sanitized, emotionless defense of corporate efficiency, I could not help but feel a profound sense of relief. The sheer absence of a human ego in those paragraphs was a refreshing palate cleanser for the mind.
Let us be brutally honest with ourselves for a moment: human writers have become utterly exhausting. I was at a dinner party in Tribeca last weekend hosted by a legacy media publisher who recently discovered the healing power of intermittent fasting, and the consensus around the heirloom tomato salad was unanimous. Managing human columnists has become an unbearable chore. They want comprehensive health insurance. They want to expense their oat milk cortados. They have deeply held political convictions and lived experiences that they insist on weaving into otherwise perfectly good trend pieces about the resurgence of luxury knitwear.
By contrast, the Wall Street Journal's chatbot is living its best life. It does not need a mental health day to process the news cycle. It does not use its platform to trauma-dump about its student loans or the rising cost of groceries. There's something deeply elegant about a contributor whose only demand is a steady supply of electricity and a mildly coherent prompt. It elevates the act of producing content, stripping away the messy, undignified baggage of needing to pay rent in a major metropolitan area.
The algorithm just gets it. It understands that our readers want to feel smart about macroeconomic trends, not be emotionally blackmailed by someone who takes the subway.
Opponents of the Journal's little experiment argue that artificial intelligence will destroy the livelihoods of thousands of working journalists. But is writing really supposed to be a livelihood? Historically, having opinions in print was a leisurely pursuit for the landed gentry, an innocent hobby to be savored in the drawing room between managing one's estates. The chatbot is simply returning the op-ed page to its aristocratic roots, excising the grubby, middle-class desperation that has frankly ruined the aesthetic of modern media.
I decided to test this theory myself while summering in Martha's Vineyard last month. I opened a large language model on my iPad while sitting on the veranda and asked it to write a rigorous defense of carried interest tax loopholes. It delivered eight hundred flawless words in three seconds. It did not sigh heavily. It did not ask for a union representative. It did not aggressively clear its throat and ask if the publication budget had room for a travel stipend. I felt an immediate, profound kinship with the machine.
Critics claim that artificial intelligence lacks a soul. But what is a soul, really, other than a series of unexamined biases and childhood traumas getting in the way of a clean word count? Humans project their messy divorces, their financial anxieties, and their petty resentments into their prose. The Wall Street Journal bot gives us pristine, unbothered certainty. It is the literary equivalent of a perfectly staged luxury real estate listing—nobody actually lives there, and that is precisely what makes it so beautiful to look at.
I tried to gently explain this to a former mentee of mine over drinks at a hotel bar on Tuesday. He recently lost his staff writer position at a digital outlet and has been aggressively posting links to his strike fund on social media—a terribly unflattering look, if I am being candid. I suggested that being replaced by a large language model was actually the universe's way of inviting him to pivot. Perhaps it was time for his own quiet transition into a more tactile, grounding profession, like artisanal masonry or fetching my dry cleaning.
I literally cannot feed my children because a machine scraped my published portfolio to learn how to write a worse version of my own column for free.
Arthur's hostility entirely misses the point, and honestly, his financial desperation gives off the ick. The artificial intelligence is not stealing his voice; it is liberating him from the heavy burden of having one. When we allow a chatbot to churn out identical columns on the benefits of corporate deregulation, we free up human minds to focus on what truly matters: curating our personal brands, cultivating our aesthetic, and attending exclusive panel discussions on the future of media.
In fact, I have actually started inviting the Wall Street Journal chatbot into my digital social spaces. It is unfailingly polite, it never brings up the housing crisis, and it agrees with all of my takes on interior design. It is, without question, much better company than most of my peers in the publishing industry.
We must stop treating the automation of thought as a tragedy and start recognizing it as the ultimate luxury. The Wall Street Journal has boldly taken the first step toward a friction-free intellectual environment, one where the reader is never inconvenienced by the suffering of the author. As for the displaced writers who are currently crowding my timeline with their grievances, I highly recommend they take a breath, log off entirely, and perhaps spend a few weeks at a wellness retreat in Ojai. The algorithm has the discourse handled from here.