CONCEPT
The Collaborator's Bad Faith
The specific self-deception of the AI-age knowledge worker — mistaking the quality of the output for the quality of the thinking, experiencing the machine's polished product as one's own earned thought.
The fifth and most intimate register of bad faith that the Sartre simulation identifies is the form specific to AI collaboration. The collaborator's bad faith consists in mistaking the quality of the output for the quality of the thinking. The prose is smooth. The arguments are well-structured. The references arrive on time. And the collaborator begins to experience the collaboration's product as her own thought, fully, without qualification — even when the product contains elements she did not think, did not earn, did not arrive at through the specific struggle of confronting an idea that resists formulation. Segal catches this dynamic with rare honesty in You On AI: 'I could not tell whether I actually believed the argument or whether I just liked how it sounded.' The inability to distinguish between genuine conviction and aesthetic pleasure in a well-constructed sentence is the collaborator's bad faith in its purest form.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction