CONCEPT
The Ethics Argument
The position that using AI is a form of cheating, plagiarism, or professional fraud — the second weapon in the Luddite's arsenal, operating through the vocabulary of authenticity, attribution, and intellectual honesty.
The ethics argument is most visible in education and creative professions, where the boundary between human and machine contribution is most consequential. The writer who refuses to use AI because the words must be 'mine.' The teacher who treats AI-assisted student work as dishonesty. The lawyer who considers AI-drafted briefs a breach of professional obligation. Each position carries genuine ethical weight — the questions about attribution, originality, and intellectual honesty that AI raises are real and unresolved — and each position simultaneously serves a strategic function of defending the pedagogical and professional models within which the deployer's expertise is most valuable. Scott's framework illuminates the coexistence of sincerity and strategy that gives the argument its force.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Scott distinguished between the beliefs that subordinate groups genuinely hold and the strategic deployment of those beliefs to contest domination. The distinction is not binary; sincerity and strategy coexist, and the sincerity makes the strategy more effective.