The most important question about AI isn’t whether or not you used it.

I was on my way to talk about artificial intelligence when an advertisement told me it wasn’t the real kind of intelligence. Bummer.

White letters on bold red: “Authentic Intelligence.” I was traveling to speak about my book, AI Optimism, and here was a giant ad suggesting the real version of intelligence is the one you reach without any help from a machine. I took a photo. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

You’ve probably felt the thing that ad is pinpointing. I’ve started calling it AI shaming. It’s the implication that if you used a tool then you couldn’t have done the task independently. It shows up at work when you drafted an email with AI and someone finds out you didn’t write it from scratch. It shows up when a student turns in a strong piece of work and the first question is not, “What did you learn?” but “Did you actually write this?” The judgment arrives before anyone asks the only question that matters, which is why you reached for the tool in the first place.

Take a moment to notice what “Authentic Intelligence” is really doing. It’s the mood talking, not best practice or reality. Social media tells us that our learners are wary of AI, so authenticity gets pitched as far from it. A few years ago, the same marketers sold the opposite: closeness to innovation, the future, the bleeding edge. The story you’re sold bends to wherever the popular vote is landing. It’s a marketing position, printed in size 212 font to grab your attention – and it worked.

So when I saw the billboard, I did what I often do, because I like a good fact-check. I searched authentic intelligence economist, and like so many of you have probably noticed lately, the browser handed me an AI summary before I asked for one. Clean, confident, well organized. It told me “Authentic Intelligence” is a concept from the World Economic Forum and tied it neatly to The Economist’s podcast called Intelligence, with a helpful “how they connect” section.

I read the AI summary, and it just felt off. It’s not that I distrust AI; I use it every day. The summary felt off because it seemed a bit unlikely that the WEF was somehow connected to the podcast, and I was skeptical that WEF had created an entire framework around it already. I looked at a few source links and discovered I was right.

On my way to a speaking engagement in which I would encourage my audience that people shouldn’t be shamed for using AI, I used AI, and it gave me something false. Retold out of context, it’s going to sound like the billboard was right all along. See, the tool can’t be trusted, people will think. But that’s the opposite of what happened. Read closely.

The billboard says the human should step back so the intelligence stays pure. My story says the human has to lean in. That false AI summary never made it into this blog for one reason: I could articulate that it was wrong, and why I thought so. And that is the real line between authentic and artificial. We need to stop focusing on whether or not a machine was involved. The moment the work becomes artificial is the moment you can no longer say why the end product turned out the way it did.

I am still the author of my content. Using AI didn’t make me a worse thinker at all. In fact, it gave me the chance to be a better one, but only because I showed up.

Here’s the part that matters for our classrooms. I caught the mistake because I had media literacy and real-world experience. I saw the sign. I’ve listened to podcasts. I’m familiar with the WEF. A student reading that same, overly confident AI summary doesn’t have that experience. They don’t have years of context that made false claims raise an eyebrow. That is not a character flaw or a lack of integrity. It’s a knowledge gap, and students cannot download their way out of it.

So I keep coming back to a question from my book, and it is not “did you use AI?” It’s “Does AI limit my learning?” In other words, are you the author or the editor? Is your voice still in the work? A kid can produce a flawless essay and learn nothing or use AI to pressure-test a messy argument and learn a great deal. The output itself tells you almost nothing.

If you want to guide your students in their use of AI, skip “watch out for hallucinations.” That’s really difficult to act on in the moment, especially for kids without context. Instead, challenge them to use their critical literacy skills and ask questions about the output they’re given.

• What do I already know about this topic?
• How does the output match my thinking?

The billboard wants to argue about whether the work is authentic, but I’m not taking the bait. The question worth asking is whether the person came out sharper, and the work can look identical either way. Only the learner knows.

Maybe that’s the real authentic intelligence: not the kind that keeps its distance from the machines, but the kind that keeps thinking while it leans in. You just can’t fit that on a billboard.