You would expect a Cambridge professor to be, at minimum, above average in his field.
Or a Harvard professor to be able to write his own screed against the President of the United States.
Hell, he should be able to do so in his sleep. After all, attacking President Trump is something Harvard professors seem to do 24/7/365, right?
Harvard professor slammed for using AI to write to write anti-Trump op-ed: ‘Worst slop I’ve seen’ https://t.co/KykmqF3tzt pic.twitter.com/LcoelZf2Cg
— New York Post (@nypost) August 16, 2026
Apparently, finding genuinely good professors is too much work, just as writing your own screeds is beyond the ken of Harvard professors in the new age of Artificial Intelligence.
First, let me assure you that the rants I write are 100% my own. It is a gift, I suppose. Not everybody can bitch, moan, and whine as well as I can, and since I get paid (a pittance, yes, but still paid) to do so, I refrain from using AI to produce my columns.
Not so Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan government minister who now enjoys a position at Harvard University.
A Harvard professor is in hot water over claims that an anti-President Trump opinion article he wrote for the Financial Times was almost entirely AI-generated, with some branding it “slop.”
The article, by former Venezuelan government minister Ricardo Hausmann, now includes a disclaimer from the FT following its publication on Thursday,
“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,” reads the editorial note at the top of the piece.
“The FT editorial code of conduct specifically prohibits the use of AI in the writing process,” the statement continues.
It came after the op-ed, which criticized President Trump’s tariffs, was called out on social media over its stilted prose.
“Gotta be the worst AI slop I’ve seen in a major publication,” one X user wrote.
Another X user shared a grab from AI detector Pangram, which showed that the 841-word piece was 71% AI-generated.
Now we do have to give him credit for writing 29% of his piece, and I will applaud him for spending the 20 minutes it took him to do so. That has to be a higher percentage of his workday than your average Senator spends doing his or her job, so that’s something.
IT’s been known for a while that students rely a bit too heavily on AI to do their work at universities, so it seems only fair that professors put in commensurate amounts of work, which turns out to be not much at all.
“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,” bemoaned Michael Socolow of the University of Maine in a social media post.
As a general rule, our academic and cultural elite rank quite high on the prestige and financial reward scale in our society, although the top ranks in both categories are entrepreneurs, whom the cultural elite despise as parasites.
But, it turns out, the real parasites are those elites who want everything in exchange for very little. Perhaps 29% of their effort.
40 out of 86 Brown students scored a perfect 100 on their midterm. Then the professor moved the final in person, and 22 of those perfect scorers never showed up again.
He’d suspected AI cheating from the start. The take-home midterm was deliberately harder than usual, yet the… https://t.co/OOgZylQeaB
— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) July 9, 2026
40 out of 86 Brown students scored a perfect 100 on their midterm. Then the professor moved the final in person, and 22 of those perfect scorers never showed up again.
He’d suspected AI cheating from the start. The take-home midterm was deliberately harder than usual, yet the class averaged 96 when the historical range is 65 to 80. Some answers contained odd phrasing that matched what ChatGPT produced when he ran the questions through it himself.
Roberto Serrano has taught economics at Brown for 34 years. He filed no accusations. He announced the final would be in person, count for half the grade, and that if the two distributions didn’t match, the final alone would determine grades.
Then the exodus. 27 students never showed up. 22 of them had perfect midterms. Of the 59 who did show, 19 failed. Several signed the exam and turned it in blank. The average fell from 96 to 48, the lowest in the course’s history.
He never needed a plagiarism detector. The cheaters identified themselves by walking away. A grade distribution became a confession.
Here’s the part nobody’s sitting with. Serrano proved it. He sent the distributions to Brown’s dean and provost. The provost never responded. The academic committee’s reply amounted to calling it “a wake-up call.” The students who bailed before the final walked away clean.
Every university in America is now grading two populations, students and students plus ChatGPT, on one curve. The honest kids in Serrano’s class watched a 96 average get set by machines, then sat a real final against it. The cheaters lost nothing. That’s the incentive structure now, and it grades itself.
These are the same people who chant “tax the rich” and demand that society be structured to provide them with comfortable lives. Asking them to actually do something in return is a bit too far.
I don’t know anything about Hausmann beyond what I have read here, and it is quite possible that he is a very bright guy, and since he rose up in the world prior to the development of artificial intelligence, it’s even possible that he is smart, well educated, and a person you could learn from if he invested any time in teaching you. I haven’t a clue.
But what I do know is that a man who can’t be bothered to actually write his own piece for a high-profile publication like the Financial Times is beyond redemption. He has abandoned his mental faculties and outsourced them to a machine that cannot even think, only regurgitate syllables that mimic considered thoughts.
One that was, ironically, trained on the genuine thoughts of others, although in the future much of the content that gets plugged back into training materials will itself be AI slop.
AI trained on AI will just become “bit rot,” which is a phenomenon similar to Xeroxing Xeroxes until they become unreadable and useless.
I’m not sure whether we have invented a new way for a civilization to decline, or whether we have just found a way to accelerate processes that have always led to civilizational downfalls.
Whatever the case, when most scientific research in the social sciences (and often medicine) is not replicable, and Harvard or Cambridge hires people for prestigious positions despite their inability to do minimally decent work, civilization is almost certainly doomed.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
Help us continue to report on and expose the Democrats’ gun-grabbing schemes. Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Read the full article here
