Why We're Banning AI

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Why We’re Banning AI We urgently need to protect human thought and creativity. Our magazine is committing itself to remaining handmade. Ensure every publication you support does the same. Nathan J. Robinson filed 15 October 2026 in Editor’s Notes Iam proud to say that as part of our new union contract, Current Affairs recently adopted one of the strictest anti-AI policies in the publishing industry. No text that is AI-generated may be published in our magazine. No AI-generated art may be used as a Current Affairs illustration. When you read Current Affairs, you are going to be reading the thoughts of a human, and seeing the results of human artistry. We’re adopting this policy because we want to directly challenge the slopification of media. Newsrooms across the country are rushing to embrace AI and replace actual writers, public opinion be damned. The CEO of Business Insider, for instance, has said his publication is “all in on AI” (which is becoming an annoyingly common slogan) and shamelessly publishes AI-written content. At least they’re honest about it. Some publications have deliberately tricked people;

Sports Illustrated was caught publishing AI-written pieces by nonexistent journalists. Guest op-eds in all of the major newspapers have been found to be either partly or wholly written by AI. Sometimes publishing this work can happen inadvertently;

here at Current Affairs, we have had plenty of freelance submissions that use suspicious numbers of em-dashes and “this is not an X, it’s a Y” sentences. (We can’t promise that nothing will ever slip through the cracks, but we’re vigilant!

) Astonishingly, though, some editors have actually defended publishing the pieces even when writers have been caught. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from a hedge fund billionaire, Stan Druckenmiller, that turned out to have been AI-generated (probably because billionaires are inarticulate due to a lifetime of never having to craft arguments to persuade the yes-men around them), but the paper defended publishing the piece, since it reflected the billionaire’s genuine opinion. The trends are dire. But it’s obvious why these publications are rushing to replace writers. They are for-profit corporations, whose ultimate loyalty is to shareholders, not workers. AI is great for them, because it can produce “content” at a fraction of the expense that a writer costs. In fact, on the Milton Friedman theory that the only responsibility a business has is to increase its profits, CEOs are obligated to replace writers with AI if doing so is better for the bottom line. It’s a simple calculation: if producing 100 posts with AI costs almost nothing and takes four minutes, but paying a writer to produce 20 posts costs $5,000, well, why would you pay the writer?

The calculation might hold even if the quality drops substantially, errors are introduced, and audience loyalty plummets. Even if you lost 60 percent of your readership, you might still make a lot more per story, because you can pump them out in seconds. Futurism reports that despite the common narrative that AI has not led to major job loss, creative industries are being “eviscerated” by AI, which is fueling “one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history,” with more than 200,000 jobs in creative industries being lost in four years. The situation is horrible for artists. Game studios are now designing their worlds and levels using “art assets generated with full AI workflows.” As Brian Merchant reported earlier this year: Opportunities and pay rates declining as clients and employers embrace generative AI. Artists getting more touch-up jobs and fewer well-paying, sustainable gigs. Pessimism, anger, and even despair, growing common, if not universal, in the field. This is especially galling given that all of the AI models that are being used to replace artists were trained through the mass theft of those very same artists’ work!

Now here at Current Affairs, we’ve decided