I prepared a lecture on intellectual integrity. Then I remembered my 'own' quarterly report was sitting in my sent folder with 'Claude helped draft this' energy radiating off every paragraph.

My son is twelve. He left the ChatGPT tab open next to Fortnite, which is the operational security of a child who has never had to hide anything more serious than a browser history full of Minecraft speedruns. The prompt read: 'Write a book report on To Kill a Mockingbird. 5 paragraphs. 8th grade level. Make it sound like a kid wrote it.' He even asked it to sound like a kid. The machine cannot sound like a kid — it sounds like a kid the way a 40-year-old TV writer thinks a kid sounds — but the request showed initiative.

I opened my mouth to deliver the lecture. The lecture I had prepared was about the sacred act of wrestling with ideas, the formative struggle of putting thoughts into words, the irreplaceable cognitive exercise of doing your own work. Then I remembered that I had, that morning, pasted a jumbled set of bullet points into Claude and typed 'turn this into a professional project status update, keep it under 300 words.' My manager had replied: 'This is excellent, very clear thinking.' The 'clear thinking' belonged to a model trained on the internet. My contribution was the bullet points, which were themselves copied from a Slack thread.

The speech I gave my son was short. I said: 'Your teachers don't allow it.' He said: 'Why?' I said: 'Because they said so.' He said: 'Do you use it?' I said: 'That's different.' He said: 'How?' I said: 'I'm an adult.' He accepted this. He is twelve. He does not yet understand that 'because I'm an adult' translates to 'I have no defensible position and I am relying on your incomplete prefrontal cortex to prevent you from noticing.'

He got a B+ on the report. I read it. It was competent, slightly generic, and contained the phrase 'Atticus Finch teaches us that justice is not always easy,' which is the 'To Kill a Mockingbird' equivalent of 'live, laugh, love.' It was, in other words, indistinguishable from what most eighth graders produce manually, which raises a question about eighth-grade book reports that I am not prepared to answer.

My quarterly report, for the record, received a 'strong performance' rating. My manager highlighted the 'strategic clarity' of my writing. I have been strategic and clear three times this quarter. Each time, the strategy and clarity originated from a server farm in Virginia. I am being evaluated on the quality of my prompts, which is exactly what my son is doing, except he is honest enough to leave the tab open.