Week 5·Week 5 in the Syllabus →

Persuading Stakeholders

Choosing the Format

• RecommendedPowerPoint Is Evil (5 min)Edward Tufte (2003)
• Recommended2017 Letter to Shareholders (“High Standards” and “Six-Page Narratives”) (6 min)Jeff Bezos (2018)
• OptionalHow to Speak (1 hr 4 min)Patrick Winston (2019)

Drafting with AI

• RecommendedWrites and Write-Nots (3 min)Paul Graham (2024)
• RecommendedAI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity and Teams, Researchers Say (7 min)Jennifer Liu (2025)
• OptionalWhy Does A.I. Write Like … That? (20 min)Sam Kriss (2025)

Spotting AI Writing

• RecommendedDo AI Detectors Work Well Enough to Trust? (5 min)Matt Robinson (2025)
• RecommendedAI Writing Has Already Begun to Appear on the Opinion Pages (5 min)Reed Albergotti (2026)
• RecommendedSigns of AI Writing (“Language and Grammar” and “Style”) (10 min)Wikipedia editors (n.d.)
• OptionalArtificial Writing and Automated Detection (paper)Brian Jabarian and Alex Imas (2025)
• OptionalWhy AI Detection Fails for Academic Integrity (paper)Jonathan A. Karr Jr., Grigorii Khvatskii, Ting Hua, and Nitesh V. Chawla (2026)

Writing for Machine Readers

• RecommendedHow to Talk When a Machine Is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of AI (6 min)Sean Cao, Wei Jiang, Baozhong Yang, and Alan L. Zhang (2020)
• RecommendedShould You Be Writing for the AIs? (3 min)Tyler Cowen (2025)
• OptionalHow to Talk When a Machine Is Listening (Full Paper) (paper)Sean Cao, Wei Jiang, Baozhong Yang, and Alan L. Zhang (2023)
• OptionalThe /llms.txt File (8 min)Jeremy Howard (2024)

Handing Over the Work

• RequiredYour Job Is to Deliver Code You Have Proven to Work (5 min)Simon Willison (2025)
• RecommendedThe Importance of Excel (5 min)James Kwak (2013)
• OptionalFinancial Modelling Code (26 min)ICAEW (2024)

Defending the Analysis

• RequiredCentaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier (10 min)Ethan Mollick (2023)
• RecommendedJudge Sanctions Lawyers for Brief Written by A.I. with Fake Citations (2 min)Dan Mangan (2023)
• OptionalNavigating the Jagged Technological Frontier (paper)Fabrizio Dell’Acqua, Ethan Mollick, and others (2023)