Who Wrote This? The Fight Over AI Bylines at Entrepreneur Middle East
Submissions arrive under an expert's name but carry another writer's fingerprints, and newsrooms are split on whether that difference matters.
Karim El-Sayed Karim El-Sayed covers company news, policy and regulation across the UAE and wider MENA for Anecdoted, with a focus on how new rules and licences reshape how startups operate. karim@anecdoted.com
Tamara Pupic, editor in chief of Entrepreneur Middle East, spent a long time deciding whether to write about AI-generated content at all. Her hesitation was not confusion. The material is everywhere now, and she expected that pushing back would look pointless.
What tipped her is the people who still care. She points to those who take real pride in their own work, and who accept that anything worth saying has to be their own something, not a machine's.
Her desk fields submissions from entrepreneurs, executives and self-described thought leaders. Their professional pitch rests entirely on expertise. They advise other people, they sell what they know, and many of them charge a considerable premium for it. That is the backdrop against which they send in articles written by software and carrying their own names.
The ease of it is what she finds shocking. And embarrassing.
Pupic does not pretend the larger war is winnable. She assumes it will be lost. Her position is narrower: the next engagement need not be, nor the one after that.
The FT attached a note. The Journal defended the practice.
The Financial Times is fighting a version of the same battle. Readers spotted AI-inflected phrasing in an opinion piece attributed to a Harvard economics professor and complained on social media. The paper responded by adding a disclaimer to the piece.
The Wall Street Journal chose differently. It defended publishing an AI-assisted op-ed credited to a billionaire investor, arguing that the commentary still reflected his authentic views. The paper's editorial page editor described AI as a "fact of modern life."
The two positions are hard to reconcile. One treats generated text as something readers deserve to know about. The other treats it as irrelevant so long as the opinions belong to the byline.
Entrepreneur US, the original brand publication, keeps an explicit rule. Its ELN Writer Guidelines place the matter under "Things that cannot be included in your article":
We do not accept articles that feature AI-generated text. Articles are run through an AI detector to identify such articles and will be flagged accordingly.
What bothers Pupic is the analogy people reach for. They treat AI as a pen, a tool for getting their opinions onto the page, as though the sentences were theirs. A pen does not choose the argument or the phrasing.
That question lands hardest on the people who submitted the text. If expertise is the product, and the writing meant to demonstrate it comes from somewhere else, then the premium being charged becomes a separate matter from the one a detector settles. Entrepreneur US has already given its answer in writing: submissions carrying AI-generated text are not accepted, and detectors flag them.
