I tell every student in every class where AI comes up the same test: if you’re using AI correctly, you have no problem telling people you used it. If you’re using it wrong, your natural instinct is to hide that fact.
That’s it. That’s the whole test. And it’s about as reliable as anything I know.
Watch How People Actually Behave
Think about how this plays out. A student who has AI write an entire paper and turns it in as their own isn’t walking up afterward saying “hey, so I had AI write this, thought you should know.” They’re hoping nobody asks. The hiding isn’t an accident — it’s the automatic behavior of someone who knows, on some level, that what they did wasn’t actually the assignment.
Now compare that to someone who used AI the way it’s actually useful: to organize research, check grammar, or sharpen an argument they’d already built themselves. They’ll tell you without blinking, because there’s nothing to hide. The thinking happened. AI just helped execute it a little cleaner — the same way spell-check has for decades, and nobody’s ever called that cheating.
What “Using It Correctly” Actually Means
AI isn’t a give-me-this-and-I’ll-turn-it-in machine. Used correctly, it’s a tool for analyzing information, spotting correlations you might not catch on your own, and helping explain something more clearly once you already understand what you’re trying to say. Somewhere near the end of that process, sure, you can have it check your grammar too. But by then, the actual thinking — the part that was the whole point — already happened.
That’s the line. Not “did you touch AI at all,” but “did the thinking happen, or did you skip straight to the finished product and hope nobody noticed the gap.”
It’s Not Just a Classroom Rule
I apply this same test to my own business constantly. Did I actually think through the SEO strategy, understand the caption I’m posting, review the pay report before it went out — or did I just hit generate and forward it along without engaging with it?
If I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling a customer, a contractor, or another business owner exactly how a piece of work got made, that’s usually a sign I skipped a step I shouldn’t have skipped. It’s a simple test, but it’s brutally effective — because it doesn’t require anyone to inspect your work line by line. It just requires you to be honest with yourself about whether you’d want to explain your process out loud.
This is adapted from Chapter 11 of Small Business, Smart Tools — “The Tell.” The book applies this same test to a payroll script that misfired, an AI receptionist, and even a love note that didn’t go so well.
