CONCEPT
Botshit
Tim Hannigan, Ian McCarthy, and André Spicer's 2024 term for what happens when humans uncritically adopt AI-generated bullshit into their own decision-making — a cascading epistemic failure in which truth-indifferent output becomes truth-indifferent action.
In 2024, writing in Business Horizons, Tim Hannigan, Ian McCarthy, and André Spicer coined the term 'botshit' to describe the specific pathology that emerges at the interface between AI output and human consumption. Bullshit, in Frankfurt's precise sense, is output produced without concern for truth. Botshit is what happens when a human accepts such output as though it were truth-oriented and acts on it without performing the evaluative work that would distinguish plausible from accurate. The term captures a cascading epistemic failure: the system produces bullshit because it cannot care about truth; the human converts the bullshit into botshit by failing to care about truth in the specific context of evaluating the system's output.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The conversion from bullshit to botshit is not a moral failure. It is an attention failure — a consequence of the conditions under which AI output is consumed. The output arrives quickly. It is polished. It sounds authoritative. The builder is