Last month a German cabinet minister was caught with his hand in the machine. By the reading of a detection tool called Pangram, a column run under his name in the Handelsblatt came back 99.3 per cent written by AI, a speech to the Atlantic Council in Washington entirely so, several turns in the Bundestag in large part. The pile-on was instant.
I read the whole thing with interest, because I know exactly where this story travels next. Sooner or later one of my more entertaining competitors will sit down in front of a camera, feed one of my essays into a detector, hold the percentage up to the lens with a solemn face, and invite the audience to draw the obvious conclusion.
So let me save everyone the trouble and answer it now, in full, before anyone presses record. Yes, I write with the help of AI. Here is exactly what that does and does not mean, and why it should not cost you a single moment of trust.
What the machine actually measured
Here is the first thing worth understanding about these tools. They do not read for truth. They do not read for judgement. They read for texture: the rhythm of the sentences, the smoothness of the phrasing, the statistical fingerprint of how the words sit beside one another. At one narrow task they are genuinely capable, which is guessing whether a passage was typed by a person or generated by a model.
Notice what that task is not. It is not whether the argument is sound. It is not whether the advice will protect your family or ruin it. It is not whether the person whose name sits at the top believes a single word of it. A detector inspects the typing. It is blind to the author. And the typing was never the thing you were trusting.
On borrowed thoughts
Give the ministry its due, because on the principle it was right. AI is a working tool, the spokesman said, and responsibility stays with the human, who must check, change and decide (the full defence is worth reading). True. The fault in that case was narrower and more specific, and it is worth naming exactly, because it is the part everyone then smears across everyone else. He placed bylined columns in other people’s newspapers and did not tell those editors how the words were made. A guest column under a national masthead carries a quiet promise about whose hand was on it. That is a disclosure problem, not an AI problem, and it exists only because there was a publisher on the other side with an expectation to disappoint.
Hold that against the sentence Der Spiegel chose to end its report on. The magazine warned that AI makes it effortless to adorn yourself with thoughts that are not your own, then asked, gravely, what becomes of us when deception turns into the norm. It is elegantly written, and it is nonsense, and it is the precise charge coming for me. So let me take it apart.
Begin with “thoughts that are not your own,” because the whole accusation hangs there. In my case it is simply false. The judgement is mine. The read on a treaty, the call on which jurisdiction actually works, the angle, the conviction: mine, drawn from twenty-five years of the work and not from a prompt box. The machine sets my thoughts down faster than I could. It does not think them for me. You cannot adorn yourself with what was already yours.
Then the heavy word, deception. Deception is not a mood. It is a specific act: leading someone to believe what is false, in a way that costs them. So the only honest question is who is deceived here, and about what. Deception needs a victim, and there is none. You came to this page for my real view and my real experience, and that is exactly what you have. No promise is broken, because no one was ever promised that I personally typed every character.
This is where the minister’s narrow fault becomes the whole point. The duty to disclose is born of a transaction or a role. A staff journalist signed up to standards. A paid ghost sold a defined thing under defined rules. A guest columnist accepted a masthead’s expectation. Each has a counterparty with a claim. I have none. No one commissions me, no editor pays me by the word, no journal stakes its name on mine. I am not a journalist and I am not a scientist. I write on my own pages, for readers who arrive freely, about a business I actually run. There is no transaction in the writing, and so there is nothing in it to defraud.
I will give the worry its one honest inch, because pretending it is empty would be its own dishonesty. There is a real version of this sin: the empty prompter, the man with no knowledge who feeds a machine, prints whatever returns, and passes off borrowed competence as a mastery he does not have. That can genuinely mislead. But it is the exact inverse of what happens here. A detector cannot tell the expert who delegates the typing from the fraud who delegates the thinking. Der Spiegel aimed its grand question at the second man, and then fired it, lazily, at everyone.
I have bought human writing. It was not more honest.
Let me tell you something from the years before any of this was possible.
For a long stretch of my career I hired writers. Not celebrated ones. The going rate was around fifty dollars an essay, and the work was, in all honesty, mostly adequate and frequently mediocre. Someone who had never emigrated, never sat across a desk from a frightened entrepreneur, never read a tax treaty in anger, would file a tidy piece on a subject they would forget by lunchtime. Every word of it was human. Almost none of it was true in the way that counts. There was a person typing, and nobody really home.
So spare me the romance that human hands make writing honest. I ran that experiment for years. The byline was real and the authorship was hollow. I left Germany in 2000 and spent the next quarter of a century actually doing this work, in Switzerland, in London, in Miami, in Malta, in Ireland. The value was never in who pressed the keys. It was in who had lived the thing.
The em-dash and other small confessions
The detectives of this new craft will gladly tell you what gives a machine away. They recite the tells: the over-fondness for the em-dash, the tidy rule of three, the elegant little reversals. I find this quietly funny, because I have since cut the em-dash out of what I publish. You will not find a single one in this essay. Not to slip past a scanner, but because I decided I prefer my sentences without it. Make of that what you will.
The point is not that I have learned to hide. The point is that surface tells are a parlour game. They catch the costume and never the man wearing it.
What you are actually trusting
Run this very essay through whichever detector you like, the most accurate of them included. I will not lose a minute of sleep over the verdict, because the number it returns has nothing to do with the reasons you read me.
You trust me, if you do, for a harder set of facts. That for twenty-five years my advice has had to be right, because clients act on it with real money and real futures and there is nowhere to hide when it is wrong. That my name and my face sit on all of it. That my convictions have not drifted to suit the season. Even the search engines have made their peace with this. Google states plainly that it rewards genuinely useful, high-quality work and demotes thin content built to game the system, however it was produced (their own guidance says so). Provenance is not the test. Quality is. It always was.
Where no machine can follow
And here is the part this whole argument tends to forget.
Every single day I record a video with no script and no teleprompter. I sit down and talk, and what comes out is whatever the years in this work have left in me: unrehearsed, sometimes clumsy, entirely mine. No model writes that, because no model has lived it. Around it sits everything else we actually do, the consultations, the events, the conferences, the long conversations with people standing at the edge of the biggest decision of their lives. That is the real centre of the work, and not a word of it is typed.
So let me put it plainly. An unscripted video, a real consultation, a room full of people at a conference: that is more human than a flawless article typed start to finish by someone with nothing to say. The badge “100 per cent human” on hollow online content is worth less than a single honest conversation.
This is also the exact place the machine stops. AI can draft and tidy and summarise, and it is genuinely useful. But it has no wisdom and no experience. It has never emigrated, never sat with a frightened client at midnight, never been wrong in a way that cost real money and had to carry it afterwards. It has read about the world. It has not lived in it.
So if you are looking for the real human thing, you will find it exactly where AI cannot reach: in the room, in the conversation, in the unscripted moment, in a life that was actually lived. That is not our weakness in this new age. It is the ground no machine can ever take, and it is where we are strongest.
Where the line really is
So here is my position, stated without a flinch.
When I write on my own pages, the contract with you is simple. This is my judgement, my experience, my conviction, and I stand behind every line. A model may help me draft faster than any team I ever paid. It does not get a vote on what is true, and it never sees a sentence I would refuse to sign.
This is not the policy of a single blog. It holds across every site and every business I am involved in. Wherever my name, or the name of one of my companies, sits above the words, the same promise stands: however the draft was made, the judgement, the responsibility and the conviction are mine, and I answer for all of it.
And on the rare occasion I am a guest in someone else’s house, under their masthead, I will say how the work was made. Not because a tool demands it, but because that is the courtesy the minister forgot.
The pen changed hands. The mind did not. Judge me, as you always should have, by whether I am right.
Life is short and fleeting. One shot. Make it count.
