Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the esteemed Wall Street Journal, just heaped praise on the sloplords drowning journalism in AI-generated dreck.
In an email obtained by Semafor, Tucker congratulated a Fortune editor for being a likeminded individual embracing AI, and was so impressed by the magazine’s AI efforts that she forced her underlings to read about them.
Last month, the WSJ reported on how Fortune editor Nick Lichtenberg used AI to crank out 600 stories in just six months at the magazine, which is more than what his colleagues write in an entire year. AI-assisted articles made up nearly 20 percent of Fortune’s web traffic in the second half of 2025.
As Lichtenberg happily admits, he was literally just copy-pasting press releases into a chatbot and asking it to spit out an article. And this, apparently, is the kind of gumshoe work that warrants being lavished with effusive plaudits from the editor of one of the US’s so-called newspapers of record.
Per the Semafor scoop, Tucker emailed Fortune’s Alyson Shontell saying she “absolutely loved” the piece about “your reporter Lichtenberg,” before lamenting the broad resistance to AI in journalism. Tucker, naturally, viewed herself and Shontell as the pioneers bucking this trend.
“I love your totally clear-eyed, unsentimental approach to AI in newsrooms,” Tucker enthused. “It makes you pretty unique among our cohort.”
“I just did an All Hands meeting with our APAC staff (I’m in Tokyo) and told them they all had to read it,” she added.
Then Tucker dropped a hot take.
“Anyone who doesn’t get what you are doing at fortune [sic], or thinks it is ‘wrong’, should get out of journalism fast!”
AI’s role in the newsroom remains a hot-button issue in the industry, with recent controversies over the New York Times publishing content that was AI-generated or assisted — in both alleged and confirmed cases — spilling over into the public eye.
Despite how divisive the tech remains, newsroom leaders are championing its use whether their underlings like it or not. A senior manager at the Associated Press, for example recently told staffers that “resistance” to AI was “futile.” Meanwhile, major newspapers have launched high profile experiments with the tech, with mixed results. The Washington Post debuted a disastrous AI-generated podcast feature last December that fabricated facts and misattributed quotes; Bloomberg uses AI to provide summaries at the top of its articles; and The New York Times has used AI to help generate headlines for years.
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