AI continues to be divisive and polarizing, especially as it relates to authorship.
Inside of this is a lurking question about how performance systems work.[1] Most cannot directly observe the things they are supposed to assess: judgment, competence, effort, attention, understanding, originality. So they infer them from artifacts.
Historically that worked reasonably well:
good memo → probably understood the problem → probably exercised judgment → probably capable person
AI inserts itself between the person and the artifact:
person → AI → good memo
This new article, based on an open data set from Anthropic, indicates that people seem to draw a distinction between identity and labor. They are uncomfortable with AI pretending to be them (writing in their voice, taking authorship, falsely implying a belief). But they are much more comfortable letting AI hide how much work they personally did: how long they spent, how much uncertainty they had, whether they struggled, whether they even paid much attention.
A funny example of the OK categories is the recent prompt that solved an unsolvable math problem:
Construct a counterexample to general (non-planar) case of Dinitz Garg Goemans conjecture. You should do a breakthrough and find a structured counterexample.
In general this research seems to support the "future world will be more small teams and small companies" hypothesis, where individuals are likely to care a lot less about how their colleagues use AI, and be much more open and honest about what sort of labor or intelligence was involved in the production of their art.
Just like remote work and even r/overemployed, we're treating the democratization of long-standard allowances the working world gives to its seniormost people as nothing less than a moral panic.
- Executives for national global have worked "away from HQ" since that was possible and important (think of this like "management by walking around" but at industrial scale.
- It seems commonplace now for tech CEOs to lead multiple firms with no public penalty (even while most companies expressly disallow this practice for everyone else).
- Almost every VP, Director, and Manager is expected to deliver work of unclear voice, provenance, vulnerability, attention, and investment.[2]
The difference, perhaps, is that in the third example, the folks who are performing the work of others have (hopefully) long since demonstrated their capability and are assumed to be able to apply that capability as a filter for the output of their direct reports/broader organization. Still, I worry that we're seeing more K-shaped outcomes more of the time.
When I say performance systems I am referring to these both philosophically (e.g. everything is a performance) and practically (e.g. what is your performance rating for Q3 2026) ↩︎
Ianucci's In The Loop turns this idea into a feature film, and it's the best. PWIP PIP. ↩︎
