Cheating in sports, work and life.
Recently, two members of my local golf club were banned for cheating. They marked their scorecards well under reality, misrepresenting their true playing ability. Why cheat? Surely, the pursuit of golfing is a gradual journey of reducing errors and improving consistency? The score actually provides us with a fair measure of progress — an in-the-moment status report on whether we are truly learning and growing, or falling back to bad habits.
Sure, it’s easy to adopt a self-righteous stance on such cheating when it comes to sports. It defies the point of playing!
So, for a sense-check on such piety, here is a more profound question:
What would happen to humanity if cheating is systematically endorsed in work and life?
Consider this recent anecdote from my own life: While on holidays, I spontaneously wrote a reflective poem while basking in the sun and gazing out to an azure ocean. I was proud of my creation and curious about how to enhance it. So, I turned to my trusty anonymised AI tool, inputting my poem and asking for suggestions. The response was insightful from an educational perspective and I must say the suggested alternate version significantly improved my original work. While I still needed to tweak it to preserve my original intent and voice, I felt an immediate sense of pride — I might even want to publish this!
My conscience piped up, “But it isn’t your work.”
“True,” I murmured to myself. The final version was certainly a derivative of my original, and I couldn’t honestly claim it as my own. “Does it matter?”, the lesser angel of my nature asked. The poem was now undeniably better, and a wider audience would appreciate it thanks to the changes. But could I really have the audacity to attribute it to myself? Would I acknowledge AI as a co-author and, if so, would that demean the value of the work and my spark of creativity?
Such a simple thought experiment, in an area that isn’t particularly precious to me, raises larger questions. How will we practically navigate the concept of attribution as we increasingly augment our thinking and bring AI into all that we produce as human beings? If I click a button to generate something, or write a sophisticated prompt, is that worthy of attribution? Is my hand significant? Indeed, is the notion of attribution potentially obsolete in our near-future? Would a Utopian vision implore that all intellectual property simply belongs to the collective, noting that our AI co-authors are in ‘The Commons’?
Hmm, but what about all the riches and fame that would surely come my way if I published my ‘great work?’
I find this ethically and morally perplexing. I don’t see a precedent. Humanity’s notion of creating, and even why we create, is facing a fundamental paradigm shift. Is it ‘cheating’ to augment your own abilities, or will we turn a blind eye on this one?
Historically we have been taught, and likely learned through our own experiences, that if we cheat in life — whether through dishonesty in sports or by outsourcing our creativity — we ultimately cheat ourselves.
(Opinions are my own… …and yes, I gleefully admit to collaborating with AI to co-write this post — was it cheating?)
