Someone told me last week that they used AI to draft a section of a manuscript, and then said, almost in the same breath, “only a little.” The qualifier did all the work. Not I used a tool, but I used a tool, and I want you to know I’m still ashamed of it.
I’ve been hearing that qualifier a lot. A physician writing about the quiet shame of AI in medical writing put a name to it: people confessing their AI use in whispers, prefacing it with “just a little,” as though the size of the admission changes its nature. It maps almost exactly onto what I see in health communications. The adoption is happening everywhere. The talking about it is happening nowhere.
Which is strange, because the numbers say the opposite. A recent industry overview puts adoption somewhere between 67 and 76 per cent — most organisations either using or testing AI across their workflows. Read that and you’d picture a field that has settled the question and moved on. The survey crossed the threshold. The people did not.
The gap between those two facts is where most of us are actually living. Officially, AI is a productivity story with a tidy percentage attached. Unofficially, it’s a thing you do at your desk and don’t quite mention at the team meeting, because you’re not sure whether disclosing it makes you look efficient or replaceable. The web developers have started saying this out loud — that AI is generating more than half their output while their employers quietly reassess headcount. They’ve decided the silence costs more than the admission. We haven’t, yet.
I don’t think the shame is about the tool. It’s about the unspoken sum the qualifier is trying to manage: if a little AI is fine and a lot is suspect, then admitting how much you actually use is admitting something about how much of the work was ever the hard part. That’s the real conversation, and “just a little” is the sound of us avoiding it.
So here is the question I’d put to the floor. If two-thirds of us are already doing this, who exactly is the whisper for?
— Ned