I wrote a few weeks ago about being open when you use AI. The argument was straightforward — be honest about when AI is involved, and people will be more comfortable trusting what you send.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the flip side of that. The people who see AI where it isn’t.
I’ve had a handful of interactions recently — with friends, with people I know well — where someone has assumed I was using AI to respond to them, when I wasn’t. A note I wrote on my phone in the back of a car. An email I dashed off at 6am. A text reply to a thread of texts. Real responses, written by me, that got flagged in someone else’s head as somehow not me.
I’ve started calling these AI Ghosts. They’re not bad-faith accusations, exactly. It’s something subtler — a perceived presence of AI projected onto interactions where there isn’t any. The flicker of a thought behind a reply: wait, did Seth actually write this?
I get it. AI is everywhere right now. It’s writing emails, drafting blog posts, generating images, producing presentations, code, music, and increasingly even voice. It’s reasonable for people to feel that the line between human work and machine work is getting blurry. And it’s especially reasonable for people who work in industries that are getting disrupted by AI to feel it most acutely. The closer you are to the rebar of the change, the more likely you are to see it in everything around you.
Still, the experience of being on the receiving end of an AI Ghost is unsettling. The first time it happened to me, I shrugged it off. The third time, less so. By the fifth, I noticed it had started to put some tension on a relationship I care about. The conversation was no longer just the content of the message — there was now an unspoken question hovering behind every exchange. Did you actually write this? Are you actually thinking about what I’m saying? Are you still in this with me?
That’s the corrosive part. Not the question itself. The fact that the question is even there.
Why this strengthens the case for disclosure
I came away from those experiences more convinced, not less, that being explicit about AI use is the right norm. At least where AI has done most of the heavy lifting. Without that signal, the suspicion bleeds everywhere. Once someone starts wondering whether a message is AI-generated, they’re going to wonder about the next one, and the one after that. They have no way to verify (at least no reliable way - as an aside, I sometimes worry that we’re all starting to sound like AI the more we use it…). So they question all of it.
Transparency, paradoxically, is what makes “this is just me” believable.
AI as a collaborator
The other thing I’ve been chewing on is the framing of AI as a replacement versus AI as a collaborator. The AI Ghosts thing only feels like a betrayal if you assume AI is substituting for the person — as if the machine has crowded the human out and the recipient is now talking to a hollowed-out version of you.
But that isn’t how most of us are using these tools. We use them the way we’ve always used collaborators: to draft, to think out loud, to react, to push back. Academic papers have always been collaborative. So has most good business writing. So is most of what gets done at a venture firm — partners, founders, advisors, lawyers, all weighing in. AI is the newest collaborator in that mix, with a different shape and different strengths, but the underlying pattern isn’t new.
What AI does change is the cost of collaboration. It’s now cheap to bring a thoughtful collaborator into a five-minute task that would previously have just been you alone at the keyboard. That’s a real shift, and it’s the reason I lean on these tools so often. But it isn’t the same as replacing my thinking. It’s an extension of it.
A moment in time (?)
AI Ghosts are a feature of this particular moment, not a permanent state of the world (at least I hope they’re not). Norms will catch up. People will get more accurate about distinguishing trained-skill output from generic-prompt slop. Disclosure will become more routine. And the question will shift, the way these questions always do, from is this AI? to is this any good?
Until then, sometimes it’s just me, at 6am, in the back of a car writing you back.