I remember the first time I used ChatGPT to write a blog post. I hit ‘generate,’ watched the text appear, and felt a rush of excitement—followed by a cold wave of dread. Is this really mine? I almost added a footnote: ‘Written with assistance from OpenAI.’ But something stopped me.
That impulse to credit the LLM is not honesty. It’s fear dressed up as ethics.
The moment you credit an LLM, you’re admitting you don’t believe your own work is worthy. You’re saying: ‘I didn’t really earn this; the machine did.’ But here’s the truth that nobody wants to admit—the machine didn’t do anything. It has no intent, no desire, no stake in the outcome. You curated, you prompted, you selected, you rejected. That’s not ‘assistance.’ That’s creation redefined.
You’ve probably noticed that every time a new AI tool drops, the same debate erupts: ‘Should we credit the AI?’ Meanwhile, the real question is ignored: Why do we need credit at all?
We’ve built a world where attribution is based on effort—how many hours you spent, how many drafts you trashed, how many bloody knuckles you earned. AI collapses that effort into seconds. So our instinct screams: ‘This must be cheating.’ But cheating implies a rule. The rule is broken. We’re playing a game where the scoreboard only counts sweat, not judgment.
Your ability to choose the right output is more valuable than the ability to generate 100 wrong ones. That’s curation. That’s taste. That’s the new creative labor. And if you credit the LLM, you’re handing the credit for your taste to a statistical model that has none.
I’ve seen this firsthand. A designer friend used Midjourney to create a branding concept. She spent two hours iterating prompts, refining the aesthetic, picking the final four images. Then she posted them with a note: ‘AI-generated.’ The clients were skeptical. They asked, ‘So what did you do?’ She felt like a fraud. But she wasn’t. The clients just didn’t understand that her eye was the product, not the pixels.
Here’s the twist: the people who scream ‘credit the AI’ are not protecting ethics. They’re protecting a status system that rewards manual labor over intellectual labor. They’re the same people who would tell a photographer ‘You just pressed a button’—as if the camera does the work. Sound familiar?
Neutrality is death in this debate. Either you own your output or you don’t. If you own it, stand by it. If you don’t, don’t use it. But don’t hide behind a disclaimer that lowers your work’s perceived value.
So I stopped crediting the LLM. I stopped feeling like a fraud. I started saying: ‘I wrote this. I decided every word. The tool was just a faster pencil.’ And you know what? Nobody questioned it. Because the work was good. And good work doesn’t need a footnote.
The next time you’re about to type ‘Generated with AI,’ pause. Ask yourself: Am I doing this because it’s honest, or because I’m scared of being exposed? If it’s the latter, you’re not solving the problem—you’re feeding the imposter.
Own your curation. Let the machine be invisible. That’s not deception. That’s the new authorship.
FAQ
Q: Isn't it dishonest to not disclose AI use?
A: Only if the audience expects disclosure. In most contexts (blogs, social media, internal docs), the output is judged on its quality, not its method. The real dishonesty is pretending you did manual labor you didn't do—but you're not claiming that. You're claiming ownership of the final product, which you curated.
Q: What if my employer or client requires disclosure?
A: Then follow the rules. But the article is about the cultural and personal choice, not contractual obligations. If you're forced to disclose, it's a compliance issue, not a moral one. The deeper problem is that the requirement itself is based on an outdated effort-based model.
Q: Doesn't this argument justify plagiarism from AI?
A: No. Plagiarism is taking someone else's specific, original expression without attribution. An LLM's output is not a 'someone else'—it's a statistical mashup of training data. The real risk is not plagiarism, but low-quality output. If you curate well, you're adding value. If you just copy-paste, you're lazy, not dishonest.