Harvard Professor Slammed For Allegedly Relying On AI In Anti-Trump Op-Ed
A star economist at Harvard is taking heavy criticism over accusations that artificial intelligence did most of the work on his anti-Trump column.
Ricardo Hausmann wrote the opinion piece attacking President Donald Trump’s tariffs for the Financial Times, which ran it Thursday. He is the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab. The outlet later attached an editorial note to the article conceding that AI had played a role.
“It has come to our attention that AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement,” the note reads, according to the Financial Times. The paper added that its code of conduct bars AI from the writing process. (RELATED: Alleged Plagiarist Academic Called Police On Colleague For Questioning Inconsistencies In His Work)
Readers flagged the column on social media over its wooden prose before the disclaimer appeared. One X user called it the worst AI slop yet seen in a major outlet. Another posted a screenshot from the detection tool Pangram indicating the 841-word piece was 71% AI-generated.
Pangram and its chief executive, Max Spero, have become a frequent authority in disputes over AI authorship, though the tool’s reliability remains contested, according to Slate. The Guardian dismissed one Pangram accusation against a longtime staffer as preposterous. A separate case saw the detector score a novel at 78% AI, a finding that helped sink the author’s book deal even as she denied using the technology, according to Fortune.
“It’s going to be very difficult this academic year trying to encourage students to write persuasively with creativity, individuality, and style… when a star Econ professor at Harvard Kennedy School publishes such easily ID’ed AI slop in the Financial Times,” Michael Socolow of the University of Maine wrote on X.
Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, who has praised the economist in the past, wrote on X that he found the episode “astonishing, both in its writing and its publication.”
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