Guilt by automation

Sometime in the last year, the burden of proof flipped. It used to be that you made a thing and people decided whether it was any good. Now you make a thing and, before anyone will engage with whether it's good, you have to prove you made it at all. That a machine didn’t do it for you. That you sweated. That it counts.

I felt the flip land last week. I'd written a reflective piece called The Reload Cost, about how AI has quietly removed the cost of switching between tasks, and what that does to the old virtue of single-minded focus. It's a quiet, personal essay. I'm proud of it. I also wanted more people to read it, so I boosted it onto X to drive some traffic back to the site. That's the honest bit I should get out of the way first: I put it in front of strangers on purpose.

One of those strangers replied that it was AI slop.

Not "I disagree." Not "the focus argument doesn't hold up." Just the label, dropped like a verdict. And here’s what surprised me. It didn’t make me angry. It made me defensive in a way I didn't enjoy noticing. Within about thirty seconds I was assembling evidence. The draft history. The paragraphs I'd rewritten more times than I'd admit. The turns of phrase too clumsy to be anyone's but mine. I was building a legal defence for the crime of having published, and it took me another minute to catch what was wrong with the exercise. I was trying to prove I'd suffered enough to be allowed an opinion. As if visible effort were the thing in question. As if any quantity of documented sweat could answer someone who had decided, before reading a word, that the work didn't count.

That presumption is the thing I want to name. Guilt by automation. The assumption that anything fluent, finished, or produced quickly is suspect until proven hand-made. It's a tax, and everyone who makes things in public is now paying it.

#I want to be fair to the other side, because I'm on it too

Let me concede the strong version of the argument up front, because it's true. There is an enormous amount of one-shotted slop on the web now. Content with no second draft, no point of view, no human who'll stand behind it. Generated, posted, forgotten. I dislike it as much as anyone. It clogs the feeds. It makes search worse. It buries the people who actually have something to say. If the complaint were only "there's too much thoughtless machine-made content," I'd be nodding along.

But the slop label has stopped being a judgement about quality and become a judgement about method. And those are not the same thing.

A lot of genuinely good work now exists because of AI, not in spite of it. Work that wouldn't exist at all otherwise, because the person who made it was short on time, short on a particular technical skill, or short on the confidence to start. For people who don't spend their working lives inside these tools, AI assistance isn't a shortcut they're embarrassed about. It's the thing that let them make something they couldn't have made before. That's not slop. That's access. The reflex to sneer at it is, more than anything, a failure of imagination about other people's constraints.

#The bit I don't like admitting

Here's the harder part. I love to write, and I find it frightening. I'm an introvert. Everything I publish carries a low hum of anxiety with it. The risk of getting it wrong in public. The small specific dread of being embarrassed in front of people whose opinion I care about. Lately there's a newer flavour: the risk of public confrontation with someone who's decided that undermining your work is a hobby.

I want to be precise about this, because it would be easy to mistake what I'm saying for "I can't take criticism." I can. I want genuine critique: tell me the argument's thin, tell me the ending's soft, tell me I'm wrong about focus. That kind of attention is a gift; someone took my work seriously enough to push back on it. What does damage is the other thing. The drive-by “slop” that engages with none of it. It doesn't tell you your work is bad. It tells you your work doesn't deserve to be read. And because it's about method rather than substance, there's no version of the work you could have made that would have answered it. You can't out-write the accusation that you didn't really write.

#The purity test nobody can pass

So how do I defend against the label? Honestly, I'm not sure I can, and I'm increasingly sure the question is a trap.

I use AI in pretty much everything I do. I'm a software engineer in 2026. It's inescapable. I've built tools that lean on it and I use third-party tools that lean on it, most of them quietly, the way you use spellcheck or autocomplete without filing a disclosure. Where exactly is the line I'm meant to stay behind to keep my work "real"? Did the model suggest a word? Did it restructure a paragraph? Did it just catch a typo? The purity test has no stable threshold, which is how you can tell it isn't really about purity. It's about having a reason to dismiss something, and "AI" is the most available one going. (I'm so tired of the word, incidentally. It's every other sentence now, mine included. I'd retire it if I could.)

#The race you can't sit out

There's a quieter cost underneath the accusation, and it's the one that actually keeps me up. It isn't only that using AI invites the label. It's that refusing it can start to look like choosing irrelevance. The work still has to ship. The client still expects the turnaround they've quietly recalibrated around everyone else's assisted speed. The people I'm competing with for attention, for work, for the few seconds anyone spends deciding whether to read me, are using these tools too. Opting out to keep my hands clean wouldn't make me purer. It would make me slower, and slower is its own kind of invisible.

So the guilt cuts from both sides. Use the tools and wear the accusation. Refuse them and lose to the people who didn't. There's no version of this where I get to feel uncomplicated, and anyone offering you a clean conscience on either side is simply not being honest.

And it isn't only people like me feeling this. AI is a lived experience for almost everyone now, not just the engineers and writers fluent enough to argue about it in the replies. People in every walk of life are working out what it means for their jobs, their kids, their sense of what's real, and plenty of them are making things with it for the first time. The idea that you have to deeply understand a tool before you're allowed to make anything with it is just gatekeeping, and the answer to a clumsy first attempt is a better one, not a closed door.

The honest position is that I made a choice under pressure, the same pressure everyone is under now, and I would rather make the work and carry the label than make nothing and keep the halo.

#I'm not standing outside this

I should be honest about my own hands in it, because the easy version of this essay has me up on a hill pointing down at the people who get it wrong. I boosted that post. I reached for the algorithm's amplification because I wanted the traffic, and it did exactly what I asked: it put my work in front of someone who hadn't gone looking for it. Whatever irritation came back, I had a hand in engineering it. So I'm not writing this from above the fray. I'm in it, same as everyone, making compromised choices about how to be seen and then living with who ends up seeing me.

Maybe that's the only honest place to land. I'm going to keep making things. I'm going to keep using the tools, because pretending I don't would be the actual fraud. I'll sign my name to the work and stand behind the process, and if the work is bad, tell me it's bad. I'll listen. But I'm done pre-emptively proving I bled enough to deserve your attention.

Critique the work. Not the toolchain.