June 21, 2026
Ctrl+Alt+Distrust
Public Service Announcement: Don't Say You Use AI for Writing
Say AI helped with your writing and people may trust you even less
TLDR: The author argued that using AI to write under your own name wrecks trust, whether you admit it or not. Commenters split fast: some backed the hard line on honesty, while others joked the essay itself needed editing and said AI is fine for polishing, just not for pretending.
A fiery blog post basically told the internet: if a machine writes for you, don’t slap your name on it and expect applause. The author compared AI-written work to cheating your way up a mountain or bolting a motor onto an exercise bike, arguing that once you admit AI "helped," people will wonder whether it did all the work. And wow, the comments did not keep it calm.
One camp was nodding along hard: if you copy and paste machine-written text, that’s not your writing, full stop. These commenters said using AI for spelling, grammar, or smoothing awkward phrasing is one thing, but claiming credit for words you didn’t really produce is where the trust dies. The big fear? Reputation. Once readers suspect "AI slop," every future post gets a giant mental asterisk.
But the other side came armed with eye-rolls and jokes. One commenter roasted the whole essay by saying AI could have shortened it to a brutal three-word summary: “don’t use AI.” Another said admitting AI help on your resume is like writing “psychic, a medium” in the corner and hoping nobody notices. Others pushed back more seriously, saying the real issue isn’t effort or suffering for art, it’s whether the final piece has a real human signal behind it. And one of the funniest reality checks came from a hard-of-hearing commenter who happily used AI to turn a fed-up message to a recruiter into something polite. In other words: the community agrees that voice matters, but they are absolutely fighting over where the line is.
Key Points
- •The author says they never allow AI to draft text that appears under their name.
- •The article uses a past ghostwriting experience to argue that whoever shapes wording and ideas substantially contributes to authorship.
- •The article contrasts ghostwriting with a chapter in *Taking Testing Seriously* that the author says was genuinely co-authored with Jeff Nadelman.
- •The author argues that readers cannot independently verify claims about how much work a person did when AI was used in writing.
- •The article says trust in written work now depends more heavily on reputation because AI use has weakened assumptions about authorship.