AI Phobia Is Just Fear That ‘Easier’ Equals ‘Cheating’

As AI races ahead, we try to step back from the fray every once in a while. Each quarter, we gather for a "think week” to reflect on our work from the previous quarter and come up with new ideas that we can build to keep delivering an incredible experience for our readers. In the meantime, we’re re-republishing five pieces by Katie Parrot with insights on how AI is changing our professional lives. First up is her piece about how companies' "zero-AI" policies reflect our cultural obsession with equating struggle with value.—Kate Lee

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

The stories follow a familiar pattern. A writer reports they have been dropped by a client—not because their work is bad or inaccurate, but because an AI detection tool flagged their human-written content as machine-generated.

These aren’t isolated incidents. From the U.S. to the UK to South Africa to Pakistan, writers have been caught in a bizarre paradox: accused of using AI when they haven’t, while agencies, freelancer platforms, and individual clients alike double down on “zero-AI” policies enforced by detection tools that are, at best, inconsistent. One writer went as far as to offer to screen-record himself typing an article to prove it was “real.” A copywriter in Ohio sent his client time-stamped drafts to prove he’d written it himself—but the client walked anyway.

Why do these businesses care so much? I suspect they aren’t really worried about AI—they're clinging to an old belief that if work isn't visibly difficult to produce, it must be less valuable. When we dig beneath the surface of "no-AI" policies and detection tools, we find an age-old assumption that worth must be measured in struggle. This mindset shows up again and again, from “hustle culture” and the “rise and grind’ mindset that defined the 2010s to recent return-to-office mandates that prioritize presence over performance. In a culture that values butts in seats and availability on Slack, it becomes easy to mistake friction for effort and effort for worth.

Oddly enough, the very thing we’re resisting—the ease of AI—might be what sets us free. AI isn’t the first tool to challenge how we think about work, but it may be the most direct. By shifting the locus of effort, AI forces us to confront our dysfunctional relationship with work. It holds up a mirror to our culture’s deeply rooted belief that struggle equals value—and in that reflection lies a rare opportunity: to reimagine work in terms of outcomes, not optics; human flourishing, not performance theater.

Performing ‘productivity’

Modern resistance to AI is just the latest chapter in a long history of moral anxiety about ease. From colonial Massachusetts—where idleness was literally illegal—to the rise of “scientific management” in the early 1900s, visible labor has been equated with virtue.

The Puritans made work a spiritual mandate. The Luddites died defending the dignity of skilled labor. And when Frederick Taylor brought stopwatch logic to factory floors in 1911, union leaders warned it would turn “proud artisans into mindless machines.” From era to era, new tools have triggered the same fear: not just of obsolescence, but of losing the moral weight we attach to effort.

A century after Taylor's stopwatch-wielding efficiency experts, we're still obsessed with measuring the performance of work rather than its results. Only now, the surveillance is digital, constant, and often invisible.

Anne Helen Petersen once memorably described this as "LARPing your job"—performing a theatrical version of productivity. Workers engage in elaborate displays of "being at work": staying visible on Slack, responding to emails at all hours, and maintaining a digital presence that signals industriousness. The tools have evolved—from software that monitors keyboard activity to AI that analyzes facial expressions in video calls—but the underlying philosophy remains pure Taylorism.