Sunday, October 05, 2025

If you use AI in your work do you brag about it or hide it?

You used AI in your work. Do you hide it or brag about it? 

1) In 2002 there was a movie Simone about an actress who is really an AI.  The Wikipedia entry tells the entire plot. I saved time by reading it in two minutes rather than watching it in 2 hours. I don't think I missed anything.

Key Plot Point: The creator of Simone hides the fact that Simone is an AI. Why hide it? Think of the publicity that would be generated by bragging about it!

The following comment would have been clever in 2002 but is so obvious now that it's banal:

Hiding that it's an AI actress is more unrealistic than having an AI actress. 

Fast Forward to 2025 and into reality: There IS an AI actress named Tilly Norwood (do AIs need last names? Apparently yes.)  She has not appeared in any movies yet but she will be on Instagram and other media soon. Are the creators trying to hide that she is not human? Quite the contrary---they are bragging about it. The Screen Actors Guild is complaining about this, see here. The complaint is that she can't be a real actress since she has no real life experiences to draw upon. If they are saying she won't be a good actress, that's for the studios and the audience and the critics to decide. If a new technology is threatening your livelihood then the argument it's not very good is a terrible argument since it may well be false and is not really what your concern is. 

2) Recently Scott used AI GPT-5-thinking to help him with a proof. Did he hide this fact? Quite the contrary, he pointed it out as an interesting application of AI. See his blog post here.

3) There was a Chemistry Nobel prize, and a Physics Nobel prize, for work done where AI played a role. Did they try to hide that AI was used? Quite the contrary.  See Lance's post on this, here.

4) Do you know of any case where AI or a computer was used and the authors wanted to hide that fact? Aside from  Chess players using a computer, and students using ChatGPT, I cannot. Not for any serious research. (My spellcheck thinks ChatGPT is not a word. This time spellcheck is wrong.) 

5) The opposite has happened: The Mechanical Turk chess-playing "machine". See here.

6) I recently saw the movie I, Robot from 2004. The main human character is against robots and says Can a robot write a symphony? He means this to be a rhetorical question whose answer is no. I counter: can a computer write a movie as dumb as I, Robot? Simone?

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