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

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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.

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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.

The irony is that these measurements often have little correlation with value creation. Knowledge work rarely follows linear patterns. Our most valuable contributions often come from reflection, seemingly "unproductive" conversations, exploration of dead ends, and invisible mental processing.

Consider a writer working on a complex piece. Their most productive day might involve two hours staring out a window thinking, a long walk where they mentally structure their argument, and 30 minutes of rapid typing. But depending on who’s doing the measuring—a client, a manager, a budget-conscious private equity buyer—only those final 30 minutes might count as “real” work.

This narrow view of productivity—favoring what can be seen, tracked, or timed—helps explain our conflicted relationship with AI. Yes, impact matters, and it would be overly simplistic to claim organizations don’t reward outcomes. But in many contexts, especially where results are hard to measure, visible effort still carries disproportionate weight. When so much of our working life is spent proving we’re working, it’s no wonder we’re uneasy with tools that make effort disappear.

AI: The ultimate easy button

When people reject AI-assisted work, they often cite concerns about quality, authenticity, or ethics. But look closer, and you'll find the same reflex that makes us suspicious of any solution that seems too easy. AI triggers this response powerfully because it doesn't just make work easier—it can make it look effortless, even when it’s not. A writer might use AI to structure a draft—but the real work lies in shaping the argument, refining the tone, and deciding what’s worth saying. The labor hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved somewhere less visible.

What makes resistance to AI fascinating is how it differs from previous technological advances. When calculators became widespread, nobody argued that "real mathematicians" should still do long division by hand. When word processors replaced typewriters, we didn't insist that "authentic writing" required correction fluid. Resistance to these technologies tended to be more about the importance of the journey than the validity of the destination. For instance, teachers worried about calculators because they feared students would lose the ability to think mathematically.

But the aforesaid writers on LinkedIn are professionals, not undergraduates trying to hit a word count. They aren’t trying to skip the hard part. They’ve spent years developing a voice, a process, a point of view. Those are the skills that make them valuable, not the fact that they can put one word after the other. Yet even when the output is demonstrably good—too good, by the standards of whoever happens to be deciding at that moment—there’s a tendency to dismiss that work as less legitimate because it didn’t look hard to produce. The writer’s expertise, honed over years, gets erased the moment a tool enters the frame.

Beyond the tyranny of effort: AI as liberation

AI isn't just another technology to adapt to. It's potentially the most powerful catalyst we've ever had for breaking our unhealthy relationship with effort. Unlike previous technological shifts that changed how we performed work, AI offers us a chance to fundamentally rethink why we work and how we measure its value.

Here's what a healthier approach might look like:

1. Expand the definition of work

Reflection, curation, context-setting, deciding what not to do—these are some of the most valuable forms of labor in an AI-assisted world. But they’re often invisible because they don’t “look” like work.

AI doesn’t eliminate labor; it redistributes it. What’s left behind is often harder to measure, but far more human. It’s time we recalibrated our definition of productivity to include the quiet, often invisible thinking that makes good work possible.

2. Redefine expertise for an AI-assisted world

As AI handles more routine tasks, our definition of expertise needs to evolve. The most valuable skills won't be the ones AI can replicate. They'll be uniquely human abilities: asking better questions, seeing connections across domains, applying ethical judgment, building relationships, and imagining new possibilities.

This isn't a retreat from technology; it's an evolution enabled by it. AI can act as a force multiplier for human creativity, handling the mechanical aspects of work that have historically consumed our time and energy. When AI handles the drudgery, we're free to focus on the meaningful parts of work that deserve our attention.

3. Make the invisible visible

Part of the anxiety around AI is not knowing what’s being paid for. When the work looks effortless, how do we value it? We need new models of communication and trust that make invisible labor visible: explaining what decisions were made, which tools were used, where discernment was applied. Not performative updates—but real transparency that restores confidence in both the process and the person.

Rewriting the rules of worth

The rise of AI is forcing us to confront our complicated relationship with effort and worth. But this reckoning was long overdue. Our attachment to suffering as a proxy for value has been undermining our work, well-being, and creativity for centuries.

As we navigate this transition, AI offers us more than just new capabilities. It offers liberation from centuries of equating worth with struggle. It gives us a chance to build something fundamentally better—a relationship with work that values impact over appearance, efficiency over suffering, and human flourishing over performance.

What if we saw AI not as a threat to authentic work, but as the tool that finally frees us from the tyranny of unnecessary effort? What if the "AI revolution" isn't about replacing humans, but about releasing us from Industrial Age assumptions about labor that have constrained us for too long?

It won't be easy to break habits of mind that date back to the Puritans, but AI challenges our assumptions about necessary effort so fundamentally that it could finally break the link between suffering and value that has defined work for generations.

The next time someone reflexively rejects AI-assisted work, we might gently ask: Are you concerned about the quality, or just uncomfortable with the ease?

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