Anti-Waymo Newspaper Op-Eds Were Largely Written With AI, Detection Tool Finds

The op-eds argued that the Alphabet-owned robotaxi company could destroy jobs, endanger riders, keep information from city governments and block fire trucks. Semafor found that a New York Daily News piece by Ira Goldstein, former head of New York's Black Car Fund, began as a draft from a PR firm. Pangram rated a series of Dallas Morning News pieces by local lawyer Amy Witherite as 95% and 71% AI-written. It scored a San Francisco Chronicle article warning that autonomous cars could stall in the street during power outages at 88%, a second Daily News piece at 68%, a San Diego Union-Tribune piece on job losses at 95%, and a Times of San Diego article on tracking Waymo's rollout at 87%.

The findings show generative AI being used to put out political messaging under named authors at volume, in a fight over a technology that is itself built on AI. They also put pressure on newspaper opinion editors, whose disclosure rules for AI-assisted writing differ widely and are often not enforced. Detection tools such as Pangram give probabilities, not proof, and the authors dispute that the scores say anything about whether the views are their own.

Goldstein told Semafor that a PR firm prepared a first draft, which he reviewed and edited before the firm placed it. He said he stood by every word and that AI being used without his knowledge to write a first draft "pales in comparison" to the damage he said robotaxis would do in New York. He added that the same PR firm later dropped the campaign and went to work for Waymo.

Michael Redmond, author of the Chronicle piece, said he uses AI tools for research, to test his arguments and to organise his writing, calling them "a fact of modern life and modern writing". A spokesperson for Witherite said her communications firm sometimes uses AI to prepare first drafts, which staff then edit and fact-check before she approves them, and called the AI question "a shiny object to try to change the subject".

The newspapers responded differently. Chronicle editor Matt Fleischer said the paper asks opinion writers to disclose AI use. Ryan Sanders, commentary editor at the Dallas Morning News, said limited use of AI for research or polishing does not disqualify a submission, but the paper does not accept pieces generated entirely by AI. Andrew Julien, executive editor of the Daily News, said the paper wants stricter guardrails, pointing to its lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, and said readers deserved original opinions rather than "machine-generated content" from companies it is suing.

The op-eds are part of a months-long campaign against Waymo's commercial expansion. Waymo operates commercially in 15 US cities but faces opposition from labour unions, ride-hailing companies including Uber and Lyft, pedestrian safety advocates and groups sceptical of AI. The Washington Post reported this month that the Coalition for Accountability and Road Safety, a group of Waymo opponents, spent more than $2.6 million on advertising in the Washington DC area in 2026, more than the winning mayoral candidate spent in the same year.

Newspaper policies on AI in opinion pages are still unsettled. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal's opinion editor said AI-generated submissions from notable figures were acceptable without disclosure as long as they were newsworthy.