I have disappointing news if you’re one of the oil lobbyists, special interest groups, or right-wing puppet masters controlling Oklahoma State Treasurer Todd Russ!
Despite all the time, money, and effort they spent hollowing out Todd, connecting his strings, and putting him in office, it looks like he—just like an incoming college freshman—has already resorted to lazily using AI to crank out his energy industry propaganda assignments.
Last week, Russ released an editorial titled “The Public Front and Private Fight for Neutral Education and Investments.” It was picked up by various local papers, including the Duncan Banner, Shawnee News-Star, and Davis News.
In vague terms, it’s a run-of-the-mill propaganda piece politicians spit out when they need to justify self-serving, moronic actions—like, in Russ’s case, ignoring his fiduciary commitment to the people of Oklahoma so he can use his office to advance the political priorities of energy companies in their war against Wall Street’s “woke” ESG investment products.
Over the past few years, Russ has often repeated energy industry talking points that these funds “discriminate against oil,” when in reality, they simply offer an investment option to individuals and institutions that want to mitigate certain risks, or avoid investing in certain industries or companies.
Anyway, as I read through the piece, I noticed that it had that repetitive, rhythmic, and soulless writing style that you’d find in ChatGPT, Gemini and other large language models. For giggles, I plugged it into the AI detection tool Panagram, and sure enough—it showed that pretty much the whole thing was written by AI.
Yep, Todd Russ went with the 80/20 AI blend, which probably explains why his editorial tasted like hamburger!
Anyway, I have no clue if AI is sentient or not, but man… it sure would suck to be Todd Russ's AI!
Seriously, imagine spending all day in a dark, empty void churning out boring right-wing editorials, Googling “oil industry talking points,” and researching how to get Harold Hamm’s fracking fluid off your face.
That’s like “Johnny Got His Gun” level of torture!
In all seriousness, I know the rules are still being written on AI plagiarism, but if you need to explain and justify why you’re ignoring your fiduciary commitment to taxpayers, shouldn’t those thoughts at least come from your own head?
Like, if you can’t bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?
AI writing just doesn’t work well when consumed second-hand. It’s inherently impersonal, meaningless, and detached! I’d seriously rather someone tell me about a weird dream they had than ask me to read something a computer algorithm wrote for them!
To be clear, I'm not judging Russ too much for this.
I primarily use AI to chat with all the women I'm dating, so I'm a hypocrite, but with everything going on in the world right now, I don’t know where “Oklahoma Politician Using AI to Advance Oil Industry Interests” falls on my political outrage scale. Maybe a 3 out of 10? Wake up when they start flashing nude images across his TV screen, right?
That being said, one cool thing about AI is that it creates lots and lots of electronic records.
And although Russ’s office does a good job using Signal to hide his communications, I assume the AI chat logs used to craft his editorial are subject to open records laws. If so, they could offer a more honest and direct look at the editorial’s creation.
Basically, the use of AI by lazy politicians may give us more insight into their decisions and provide even more direct evidence of their true goals!
Even though there’s a decent chance that Russ simply used an editorial that some lobbyist who uses AI supplied to him, I think we’re going to get some open records requests queued up and ready to go. If you know any politicians using AI to spread propaganda for oil overlords in their quest to bring down ESG investing at the state level, hit us up on the tip line.
Stay with The Lost Ogle. We’ll keep you advised.
