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NO PUBLIC UNDISCLOSED AI That's my new heuristic after the last few years of seeing AI in practice. As context, there's a Laffer curve[a] for AI. The optimal amount of AI in most things is not 100% nor 0%. Because if you use 0% AI, it's slow, but if you rely on 100% AI, it's slop. The exact number is situational. But just knowing it's not 100% or 0% is actually a useful heuristic. That said, a few hard-and-fast rules are useful. So here they are: (1) Rule 1: don't use AI-generated text in public. Don't use AI-generated text in outbound emails, in DMs, or on websites. Because AI text is the new lorem ipsum, namely lorem aipsum. It's fine as a placeholder, for a prototype, but if you actually use it in production it's just verbose and cliche-ridden. It signals that you haven't actually put any thought into what you're writing. (2) Rule 2: don't use undisclosed AI imagery. Be cautious about how and where you use AI-generated images or videos, particularly ones where you haven't carefully fine-tuned the prompt. I didn't pattern match this until this year, because the tech is quite new, but by 2025 whenever I see slides with low quality AI-generated imagery, I think "ok, that's probably fake." You can still use AI imagery in prototypes, in fictional movies, or in graphic design contexts where it's obviously AI. And you can also use a lot of prompting with a tool like Midjourney to get high quality AI imagery that genuinely illustrates what's in your mind's eye. But, roughly, it's garbage-in, garbage out. If you didn't put a ton of effort into your AI images, if you didn't add a lot of information with your highly specific prompts and do many reps to pick the best one, the result will be obviously bad (and fake). (3) Rule 3: AI is fine in private, but disclose in public. You can use AI to research things or prototype things for your team or yourself, where it's obvious that what you're getting back is AI. However, be very cautious about using it in public without disclosure. Again, if I get a message that has obvious AI text in it, I think the sender is either lazy, or can't write, or has low reading comprehension, or hasn't put any thought into what they're asking about, or all of the above. Ironically, it signals the opposite of what early adoption normally signals! AI text in communications actually indicates low intelligence, or at least a total lack of savvy, rather than artificially high intelligence. If you put that together, it's a short rule: "no public undisclosed AI." (a) So you can use AI in private without disclosing, because it's just search results or raw data analysis for your team to review. (b) And you can use AI in public, with disclosure. And that disclosure could sometimes simply be the context, where it's an obviously fictional video or labeled a prototype. (c) And you have a more sophisticated rule than simply saying "no AI", which is highly suboptimal because 0% AI is slow in many contexts. What you just shouldn't do is use AI publicly (which includes cold emails or DMs) without disclosing it. This is in your interests as well, because by disclosing it the other party knows you aren't trying to pass off a quick AI search result or AI prototype as the real thing. In general, if the text sounds like AI, it's usually bad. AI is for suggesting as opposed to writing. The one exception is for people who speak English as a second language. But even then they should add a note saying "this is an AI translation." https://t.co/Uq5QCe0N9S This objection is worth rebutting, as I’m normally sympathetic to an argument like this. But the issue is that AI radically increases the cost to *verify* even as it slashes the cost to *generate*. So in many verticals it increases costs, because verification was cheap and is now costly. Fundamentally that’s because current AI tools (a) consistently produce *subtle* errors and (b) are used to spam channels that weren’t built to detect that many convincing forgeries. For example, the market for (say) email has been made worse by AI slop. Polite disclosure is one way to control verification costs; “oh yeah, that’s just an AI result, but take a look it’s a prototype.” Impolite identification is another: “this message was obviously AI spam, so don’t send any more.” And AI tools to detect use of AI tools will be yet another mechanism to control verification costs. Good AI use can produce great results. But that usually means a lot of work on prompting, or a creative prompt, or both. Because prompts are tiny programs, and prompting is programming. Bad AI use is like being a bad programmer. It’s a leaky abstraction, and the source code is poking through the wallpaper.