The Arts Workplace

If you’ve ever felt vaguely wrong about using AI for part of your job, you’re not alone, and you’re not cheating. That feeling has a name — AI shame — and it’s been following arts administrators around for the past couple of years. I made this video to put it in historical context, because the discomfort is real, but the argument behind it isn’t new. And it’s been wrong every single time.

What’s Covered

• Why the “AI is cheating” argument traces back to Socrates — and has been wrong every time
• The three ways we panic about disruptive technologies: dismiss, fear, condemn
• Expert predictions that completely missed the mark on home computers, the internet, and the iPhone
• Why AI shame leads people to hide their use, which makes it harder to manage, not safer
• What a transparent AI workflow actually looks like in practice
• How to start normalizing AI use inside your organization

We’ve Been Here Before

In the video I walk through a pattern that shows up every time a new tool threatens the old way of doing things. First, the experts say it’s a fad. Then they say it’s going to destroy everything. Then they say it’s lazy and illegitimate. Then it becomes standard and nobody talks about the old arguments anymore.

We did this with home computers. With the internet. With the iPhone. The VCR. Early electricity. In almost every case, the people who were most confident it was going to fail or ruin us were wrong. Not a little wrong. Embarrassingly wrong, in ways that got documented and are now easy to look up.

The “cheating” argument has the same history. Socrates thought writing would destroy the human capacity for memory. We said the same thing about calculators in math class. Wikipedia was going to end research skills. Spellcheck was going to make us bad writers. None of that happened. What happened instead is that people learned how to use the tools, and the tools became part of the work.

Why Shame Is the Problem, Not the Solution

Here’s the thing about AI shame: it doesn’t actually make your AI use more ethical. It just makes it invisible. And invisible is a terrible way to manage a powerful tool.

When people hide the fact that they’re using AI, organizations can’t develop policies for it. They can’t create standards. They can’t figure out where it’s useful and where it’s risky. The shame doesn’t protect the institution. It just keeps the institution from being able to manage what’s actually happening.

I’m not arguing that there are no legitimate concerns about AI. There are. But the grain of truth in the “AI is cheating” argument isn’t that using AI is wrong. It’s that there are specific uses that are actually problematic: passing off AI output as your own original analysis without verification, using it in ways that introduce bias you’re not accounting for, applying it where the stakes require human judgment you’re not providing. Those are real problems. Shame is not how you solve them.

What Transparent AI Use Actually Looks Like

In the video I walk through what my own workflow looks like, specifically because I think one of the things that makes this conversation hard is that people are imagining AI as a black box that produces output nobody reviewed. That’s not how I use it, and I’d guess it’s not how most thoughtful practitioners use it either.

The human judgment is still the work. AI helps me move faster through parts of the process that would otherwise slow me down, so I can spend more time on the parts that actually require my expertise, my institutional knowledge, and my understanding of what’s true for this organization right now.

How to Start Talking About It

If you’re using AI at work and not talking about it, I’d encourage you to start. Not because you owe anyone a confession, but because being out loud about your tools is part of being a professional who manages them responsibly. It also gives other people permission to be honest about what they’re already doing.

The goal isn’t a world where nobody uses AI. It’s a world where the people using it know what they’re doing and why, and can have a real conversation about the tradeoffs. That starts with someone going first. Might as well be you.

Watch the full video above, and if this resonates, I’d genuinely like to hear where you are on this. Are you using AI openly at work, or is it still something you’re keeping quiet? Drop a comment below.