“I draw a red line at writing. Every sentence I write, whether it's an email, an op-ed piece, or my forthcoming book on Marie Curie, every sentence is typed by my fingers and comes from my head and from my heart. For me, if I'm not writing and composing and crafting the sentence, I'm not fully understanding exactly what I want to say.”
EconTalk · In-Depth Interviews · November 2026
Context
Russ Roberts had described how closely he works with an AI assistant. Walter Isaacson says he uses AI heavily for research and translation, but not for writing.
Transcript
…and there are things I don't allow my technology to do. I spend a lot of time with Claude, OpenAI, even Grok and others doing research saying, you know, translate all of Marie Curie's scientific notebooks for me. But I draw a red line, which is, I'm sorry, did you want to say something, Les?
No, just it's incredible. Its ability to translate, it's right now it's teaching me Hebrew with incredible facility better than any app, and it's totally included in the price.
But I was going to say, if you don't mind, I draw a red line at writing. Every sentence I write, whether it's an email, whether it's an op-ed piece, or whether it's my new introduction to the innovators or my forthcoming book on Marie Curie, every sentence is typed by my fingers and comes from my head and from my heart. And why? Not necessarily because I think I'm a better writer than Claude, although I do think I am, but I know that my words are my words and not the words of some AI LLM. And I don't have a grand philosophical reason, but for me, if I'm not writing and composing and crafting the sentence, I'm not fully understanding exactly what I want to say. So I allow my students at Tulane to use AI even to do their projects, but I make them show exactly what the AI did and exactly what they did. And I say, when it comes to the final writing, if you don't craft those words in your mind, you are not fully understanding them and you're not really responsible for those words. So I draw the red line at if it's a sentence that's being published by me, that sentence is written by my fingertips, typed on my keyboard, and…
Yeah, I'm with you again, but we're a different generation than the young people who have had it from the beginning. I wonder if they'll feel that same connection. What do you think of the value of the liberal arts in the age of AI? I
think that I enforce on my students at Tulane that if they want to be in my class on the history of the digital revolution, they should be double majors. And that means they should major in one of the hard sciences or math, and they should major in one of the humanities or social sciences. So they…
Yeah, Microsoft Outlook would probably be a little bit more pleasant to use, but I'll leave that for another time. After talking to all these tech giants, and they're very impressive people, many of them in their public stances are fearful. They're fearful of the future. They're not, you talk about…
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