WSJ Tech News Briefing · The Wall Street Journal

Meet the Journalist Using AI to Write Stories

·12 min·1 clip

AI-assisted complaints get 7% better results from financial firms, changing how consumers seek redress.

This WSJ Tech News Briefing episode, hosted by Belle Lynn, examines how AI is changing professional writing in two distinct contexts. The first segment features Ming-Kyu Shin, an assistant professor of marketing at City University of Hong Kong, discussing research analyzing Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaint data. Her team found that AI-assisted complaints increased dramatically after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and by early 2024, roughly one in ten complaints submitted to the CFPB were written or edited with AI help. The key finding is that AI-assisted complaints receive approximately 7 percentage points better outcomes from financial institutions. Shin attributes this to a 'presentation effect' — AI improves how complaints are worded without necessarily changing their substance, making them more persuasive and professionally articulated. She also notes that AI adoption was higher among previously underserved consumers, such as those facing language barriers, suggesting AI may be democratizing access to effective advocacy. For companies, her advice is to take these AI-written complaints seriously as a genuine signal from customer segments they may have overlooked. The second segment profiles Nick Lichtenbrot, a reporter and editor at Fortune magazine, who uses AI tools to write commodity news stories — routine, structured pieces like earnings reports and market updates — then edits the output and adds his own voice and analysis. WSJ reporter Isabella Simonetti explains that Fortune has taken a proactive stance on AI as a competitive response to declining search traffic, which AI tools are eroding by allowing readers to get news summaries directly from chatbots. Lichtenbrot argues that AI speeds up routine work and frees him for longer investigative and feature reporting. Simonetti identifies two major risks: AI hallucination, which can lead to factual errors, litigation, and loss of reader trust; and the existential question of journalistic voice and identity. The episode is balanced in tone, presenting both the promise and the legitimate concerns around AI in professional writing. The audience is business and technology professionals interested in AI's practical impact on knowledge work.

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