“One detects, among the professional classes, a rather telling evasiveness on the subject of AI. Ask a senior executive or a celebrated academic whether they use such tools, and you will receive a carefully modulated response – something about calendars, perhaps, or restaurant recommendations. The implication is that serious minds have no need for such prosthetics. This is, to put it plainly, nonsense.

The same people who publicly dismiss these technologies are privately relying on them to organize their thinking, refine their prose, and simulate the fluency they once had to labor for. I do not blame them for this. The tools are genuinely useful.

What I find (ironically) disingenuous is the pretense – the insistence on maintaining the fiction of unassisted excellence while quietly pocketing the advantages of assistance. It is the intellectual equivalent of a tax haven: everyone who benefits agrees not to mention it, and anyone gauche enough to admit the truth is treated as having committed some obscure violation of taste. The result is a silent conspiracy of the competent, each member pretending that the ladder they climbed was not, in fact, an elevator.

The humanities PhD who writes clean first drafts and thinks in complete paragraphs is not more authentic than the person who struggles. They are less constrained. They have mistaken their ease for virtue – and some of them would rather dismiss an entire technology than confront the possibility that the hierarchy they climbed was never measuring what they thought it was.

Some people are experiencing a real leap in agency and cognition. Others are not. This is uncomfortable to say, but it is observable. The danger is that we will cling to outdated measures of merit while the ground beneath them shifts.

The opportunity is quieter and more humane: a chance to recognize that ability is not a fixed trait but a relationship between a mind and its environment.

We are only beginning to see what happens when that environment changes.”

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