A big shot economist at Harvard is getting raked over the coals after accusations arose that he utilized artificial intelligence in the composition of an anti-Trump column he wrote, with the A.I. program doing most, if not all, of the heavy lifting for the piece. Ricardo Hausmann crafted an opinion piece slamming President Donald Trump’s tariff policies for the Financial Times.
Hausmann is the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, along with serving as the director of Harvard’s Growth Lab. Not long after publishing the op-ed, the Financial Times attached an editorial note admitting that A.I. did indeed play a role in the article’s creation.
“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 says. The publication then added that its current code of conduct forbids the use of AI from the writing process. The piece was flagged by readers on social media due to its wooden prose.
According to a report from The Daily Caller, a user on X referred to the anti-Trump screed as the worst A.I. slop to be produced by a major outlet. Another individual took a screenshot of the op-ed after running it through an A.I. detection tool called Pangram, which indicated that 71% of the 841-word article was generated by artificial intelligence.
Max Spero, the chief executive for Pangram, has become one of the leading experts on disputes over A.I. authorship, however the reliability of the program is still being disputed. For example, The Guardian lambasted Pangram’s accusation against one of its longtime staff members as being ridiculous. A different case saw the detector score a novel as being 71% A.I., which sunk the author’s book deal, despite the fact that she denied using it to create the book.
“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 stated in a post published on X.
Joe Wisenthal of Bloomberg has continually praised the economist in the past, writing in a post on social media that he found the incident, “astonishing, both in its writing and its publication.” Folks on X had a lot to say about the accusations against the professor, most of it not in his favor. “Harvard professors have turned out to be either pedophiles or raging liberals what a disgrace of a college once we used to call this s**thole ‘prestige,'” one user said.
"*" indicates required fields
“The bloom is off the ivy rose. Fraud is through the roof in these institutions. All they care about is publishing safe omg who gives a flying f garbage. Then their “peers” clap them on the back and hand them their own sound and fury signifying nothing hack bs,” another individual said. Someone else took their filter off and let their true feelings fly, writing, “He is a piece of garbage paid off by Soros.”