“This Is AI” The genetic fallacy in a new coat — on three propositions of Adam Clermont

Mr Adam Clermont, a solicitor, has set down three propositions:

That “this is AI” has become the laziest dismissal in public discourse.

That he does not care how something was written, if the ideas are good.

That the tool was never the problem.

I am asked to give an opinion. I shall give it, and I shall also give the boundary at which I think his second proposition requires an amendment — for a defence which cannot be criticised is no defence at all, and I do not intend to do Mr Clermont the discourtesy of agreeing with him uncritically.

There is a question which has disfigured European thought since Bacon, and which reappears in every generation wearing whatever costume the age provides. The question is: what is the source of your knowledge?

It sounds innocent. It sounds like rigour. It is, in fact, the question of the inquisitor, and it is always the wrong question. Ask a man for his sources and you have already conceded the principle that authority certifies truth — that the pedigree of a proposition determines its standing. From there it is a short walk to the position that we may know in advance, from the provenance of a claim, whether it is worth examining. And a doctrine which tells you in advance what need not be examined is not an epistemology. It is a licence.

The right question — the only question — is: how can we detect and eliminate the errors in what has been said? This question does not care where the statement came from. It cannot care. An argument does not become invalid because a scoundrel advanced it, nor sound because a bishop did. A proof is checked line by line, and the checking makes no reference to the hand that wrote the lines.

So when a man is handed a piece of reasoning and replies “this is AI,” he has not made an objection. He has declined to make one. He has performed the ancient manoeuvre of attacking the origin in order to avoid the content — the genetic fallacy, which philosophers named a long time ago and which loses nothing of its vitality by being named. The novelty here is only in the coat. The fallacy underneath is the same one that once ran he is a Jew, he is a woman, he is a tradesman, he did not attend the right college. It is the oldest move there is, and its persistence tells us something depressing about how little the naming of fallacies protects us from committing them.

But I want to say something sharper than “it is a fallacy,” because fallacies are common and most of them are harmless.

What makes “this is AI” worth attacking is that it is unfalsifiable in use.

Consider how it operates in the wild. A text is clumsy — obviously AI. A text is polished — too polished; obviously AI. It contains an em-dash, a tricolon, a balanced sentence — AI. It contains none of these — AI, they’ve learned to hide it. The accusation absorbs every possible observation. There is no piece of writing you could produce, and no property that writing could have, which the accuser would accept as a refutation.

I have seen this before. I saw it in Vienna, in the consulting rooms. A man pushes a child into the water: inferiority complex. A man dives in to save the child: inferiority complex. Adler could not be embarrassed by any case, and he took this for the strength of his theory. It was its weakness. A theory which forbids nothing tells us nothing; a criterion which convicts everything convicts nothing.

Notice the structure precisely, because it matters. The accuser is not making a claim about the world that could turn out badly for him. He is making a claim which is costless. He risks nothing, stakes nothing, and can never be shown to have been wrong — because if the text turns out to be human, he says he was speaking of the genre, or the culture, or the tendency. This is what I have elsewhere called the immunising stratagem: the protection of a position by an auxiliary move which is itself not independently testable.

A man who says “this is AI” has therefore not entered the argument. He has purchased the appearance of critical vigilance at zero price. And critical vigilance which costs nothing is not vigilance. It is posture.

Mr Clermont calls it lazy. I would call it worse than lazy. Laziness merely fails to do work. This does something more corrosive: it simulates the work, and thereby occupies the place where the work should have been. It is criticism-shaped, and it is not criticism.

Mr Clermont’s third proposition is the one I find easiest to endorse, and the one with the longest history behind it.

There is a story, probably improved in the telling, that certain of Galileo’s contemporaries would not look through the telescope. Whether or not any particular man refused on any particular afternoon, the story survives because it captures a real and recurring behaviour: when an instrument produces observations you do not wish to accommodate, it is far cheaper to impugn the instrument than to revise your cosmology. Attack the lens and you need not answer the moons.

The printing press was denounced as the death of memory and of proper learning. The typewriter was said to coarsen prose and to sever the writer from the thought that ran down his arm into the nib. The pocket calculator was to be the end of arithmetic. Each time, the complaint had the same shape: the ease is the danger. And each time, what actually happened was that the volume of bad work increased — because the volume of all work increased — and the standards by which we sort good from bad had to be applied more energetically rather than abandoned.

There is a genuine problem in the neighbourhood, and I will not pretend otherwise. It is not falsity. It is flooding. Criticism is scarce; attention is scarce; the number of hours a serious reader can spend refuting nonsense is finite. Any technology which lowers the cost of producing plausible sentences raises the cost of maintaining a critical culture. That is a real difficulty and it deserves real thought.

But observe: this is an argument about the economics of attention. It is not an argument about the validity of any particular text. To slide from “there is now more text than can be checked” to “therefore this text is bad” is to smuggle a claim about aggregates into a verdict about an instance. It is precisely as sound as arguing that because most letters are junk, this letter is junk. The premiss may be true. The inference is rubbish.

Now the qualification, which I think Mr Clermont will accept, because his profession has been making this exact distinction for six centuries.

He says: I don’t care how something was written, if the ideas are good.

As stated, this is too broad, and the counter-example is one that a solicitor meets before breakfast.

There is a class of statement whose entire content is its provenance. When a witness says I was there and I saw the car strike him, the value of the utterance is not in the ideas. There are no ideas. The value is the causal chain running from the event, through a pair of eyes, into the sentence. Cut that chain and nothing remains — the words are the same words, and they are now worthless. The same holds for the affidavit, the attestation, the medical history, the confession, the account of a life lived. In all of these, authorship is not the packaging. Authorship is the cargo.

A solicitor already knows this distinction better than most philosophers, because his practice is built on it. He distinguishes without effort between evidence and submission. For evidence, provenance is everything, and he will fight over it for days. For submission — the argument, the construction of the statute, the reasoning from authority to conclusion — provenance is nothing, and no judge has ever asked whether counsel drafted his skeleton himself, at what hour, with what assistance, or in what state of sobriety. The skeleton argument stands or falls on whether it is right.

So the amended proposition, which I would defend without reservation, is this:

Where the claim is testimony, provenance is decisive. Where the claim is argument, provenance is irrelevant.

And note what follows. The overwhelming majority of what “this is AI” is deployed against is not testimony. It is argument, exposition, analysis, explanation — the submission, not the evidence. In that domain the dismissal is not merely lazy. It is a category error, applying the standard proper to a witness statement to a document which never claimed to be one.

I want to be plain about the stake, because I have watched societies close before and I know what it looks like at the beginning. It never looks like tyranny at the beginning. It looks like a shortcut.

An open society is not one in which everybody is right. It is one in which the correction of error remains possible — in which any claim, from any quarter, can be brought before the tribunal of criticism and made to answer. The mechanism is fragile, and it is not sustained by good intentions. It is sustained by the habit of engaging with what was said.

Every dismissal-by-origin erodes that habit a little. It re-establishes, in a new idiom, the principle that we may know from the badge who need not be heard. It converts the reader from a critic into a sorter — a man whose task is no longer to test propositions but to classify their pedigree and file them accordingly. And a culture of sorters cannot detect its own errors, because detecting errors requires that somebody actually read the argument.

There is a further irony, and it is not a small one. The dismissal is most reliably deployed against the careful. Sloppy, angry, tribal writing is admitted without challenge — it carries the marks of the human hand, and the marks are taken for a warrant. Structured, qualified, evenly-argued writing draws suspicion precisely because it is structured, qualified, and evenly argued. We have contrived a filter which passes heat and blocks light.

I will end where I always end, because I have never found anything to put in its place.

Take the thing that has been written. Ask what it asserts. Ask what would have to be the case for the assertion to be false. Then go and look, and see whether it is.

That procedure is indifferent to authorship. It was indifferent when the text was cut into clay, and it was indifferent when it was set in lead, and it is indifferent now. It cannot be made to depend on who or what assembled the sentences, because the sentences are not what is being tested — the claim is being tested, and the claim is out in the world, standing apart from whoever first uttered it, available to anyone with the patience to try to knock it down.

There is only one honest way to dismiss an argument, and it has never been to say where it came from.

It has always been to show that it is wrong.

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, diē tertiō decimō mēnsis Augustī (13 Augustī 2026), ā Carolo Poppero per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Karl Popper, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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