From the Editor’s Desk: We Will Not Allow AI Writing

Surrendering to its intellectual and spiritual sloth is to spit not only on duty and Veritas but on ambition

The death of things worth fighting for often has one cause. Never a bruising melee; the end arrives when you can no longer lift a finger. It arrives with acedia, or apathy, once one of Christianity’s eight wicked thoughts before Saint Gregory the Great merged it into Sloth, of the seven mortal sins. You know it by other names. Carelessness. Indolence. Disengagement. Retreat—from the strenuous life and its struggles. So nearly came the end for The Harbus, when all that stood between this paper and its survival were a few uncashed checks left to gather dust on our office counter.

Through much exertion, we have set the financial and cultural foundations for The Harbus News Corporation to last a long, long time. But the apathy that nearly killed our organization now comes for its lifeblood: the content we publish. An Editor-in-Chief said long ago that The Harbus was a great business and a good paper. It is unacceptable that the first—and now one of the last—graduate school newspapers is to be reduced to a mediocre business and a sloppy paper. The number of AI-generated submissions we receive from the HBS community has surged exponentially in the last two years. We have determined that more than a few of our submissions are anywhere from three-quarters to fully generated by AI.

Now, we understand writing is not for everyone. We also understand that AI is inescapable, both in casualty and benefit. The technology can help us research more quickly and more thoroughly, though AI research must always be done with caution. It can help us automate manual tasks, and The Harbus is pushing to integrate it into our operations. Unlike other publications that completely ban AI usage or leave AI usage in writing ambiguous, we allow some of our submissions to utilize AI to polish prose that are incidental rather than central to their idea.We draw the line, however, at allowing it to fully substitute the writing process. A conversation with an AI chatbot that produces copy-pastable writing—even AI output that has been questioned and refined and edited—is not writing. Writing is generative from the self. Writing is a forcing function for clarifying genuine belief. The goal of writing is not the end result, which we students myopically focus on; it is the odyssey that imparts uncomfortable lessons, the intellectual combat that beats ideas and values into words others can understand, the training that allows a mind to judge and distinguish truth from falsities, the difficulty of painting a subject that forces productive mistakes. 

More often than not, the author of some clearly AI-generated output cannot talk at any length about their subject. They can only repeat what AI told them; one question, and they start repeating themselves. It calls into mind the infamous scene tarring Harvard from Good Will Hunting: Do you have no thoughts of your own? If the MBA pedagogy already treads a fine line between teaching decisiveness and glibness, AI pushes it fully over into the latter. Allowing AI to fully generate prose goes further than just emptying the self of substance—it is to deceive the self. It is against Veritas.

We already know what the technologists will say. Look at, say, the telegraph—the Luddites said it would cut the attention we dedicated to composing a handwritten letter. It would dumb us down. They were wrong, yet what the technologists do not understand is that technological evolution, for some things, has a terminal end. Should there be no gap now between the weight of the written word and the weightlessness of the spoken word? Should AI, after this, take over the spoken word, too? Imperfection and conflict is what drives us toward deeper understanding, and their erasure will render us little more than competent machine-viruses.

But moral appeals are insufficient for the climbers among us. You may think scoring a piece in our pages is a checkbox to tick off. You may think if Claude can do this for you with a rigamarole of your edits overlaid on top, so be it. You may think giving AI license over your writing for a student paper is an act with no career consequence. That is to do a disservice to your ambition. This is how your managed decline begins. Jeff Bezos made his executives write for a reason: “There is no way to write a six-page narratively structured memo without clear thinking.” 

We understand writing as an act of creation not dissimilar from founding. You are moving from nothing to something, which demands titanic creative effort and thoughtful iteration. Do you think Buffet would have outsourced his shareholder letters to AI? Do you think Ford or Jobs, both of whom engaged deeply in writing as decision and as communication, would allow AI to pull their minds down toward its mediocre median? Do you think summiting their peak is possible if you replace your thinking with AI? We give the climber the benefit of the doubt—you came here with some sort of extraordinary ambition. Harvard inflates it, but how are you to look ambition in the eye if you do not strive for excellence in your every pursuit?

Now, given the unenviable choice, we would rather publish mediocre prose that has been thought through, even underwhelming prose that is motivated by passion, warts and all on proud display, than perfect prose fully assembled by sentence-completion algorithms. This is the duty and purpose of any community media. How many of you would rather read an AI-generated paper, even if the writers swore it represented their thoughts?

We understand that students feel busier than ever. But The Harbus refuses to yield to your calendar and the supposedly unstoppable forces that push you to completely outsource your writing to AI. We refuse to become another casualty of what has already infected so much of higher education. There are many classmates who find the time to write—fully. You can too. If you choose to engage with us; if you choose to participate in the public forum; if you choose to write—you will have to punt the occasional party and the occasional club meeting and the occasional coffee chat to do so. FOMO, which originated in a 2004 Harbus op-ed, will not be the reason we can no longer provide this community with a paper worth reading. As you pass through the last schooling you will ever have, remember well that what holds true here will hold true in life: Engage in few endeavors, but engage in them well. 

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.