AI Shame

4 days ago
5 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

This is a story about a time I wanted to put a paper bag over my head.

Imagine one of those acronym edtech conferences. A big one. And imagine me, alone, lunch tray in hand, walking around the huge dining room, looking for a table with friendly faces and an open chair. The table I pick is wonderful: educators from big schools, small schools, private schools, and charters from literally all over the globe: USA, Ghana, Portugal, Singapore, and Fiji. We have a lovely conversation. I grow especially interested when one new friend mentions he is one of the proposal judges for this very conference. I express lots of curiosity about what makes some proposals stand out and others get passed over. My new friend gleefully tells me that he instantly rejected any proposal he felt had been "obviously" created by AI. He could just tell, he says.

Oh, how I wanted a paper bag for my head!

You see, one of my proposals had been accepted that year. The other one hadn't. My rejected session was about using AI. And of course, you guessed it: I had used AI to help me write that rejected proposal.

AI Shame. It washed over me in waves, throwing my Impostor Syndrome tendencies into high gear.

Part of me wanted to argue. After all, I was sure I had not used AI the way my acronym'd friend assumed. I didn't prompt "Hey, write me a session about AI," erase a few obvious AI tells (like em dashes and the words "surface" or "leverage") and then pass it off as my own. In fact, my process took weeks of iterating, reiterating, tinkering, drafting, and sifting through feedback. I put the conference rubric into the AI agent I used and challenged the tool to grade my draft against it. Then I went back and revised where I thought the AI had a point about my deficiencies. The resulting proposal described a session I felt excited to lead. I felt confident it would land with my audience, and it was stronger than anything I could have created without the pushbacks and critiques I had required the AI agent to throw my way.

But my own colleague clearly thought I was cheating.

I sat at that table and said nothing, wishing for a paper sack to put over my head.

A few months later, I stood in front of a room full of educators and asked a simple question: “Who here has used AI already?”

A few people cautiously raised a finger in the air, blushing and ducking as others loudly declared their anger at AI. It's Skynet, but with hallucinations! It's going to make us lazy! It steals from artists! The whole internet will turn into AI slop!

After the session, though? People lined up to talk to me. "Yeah, I use AI all the time," they confessed shyly, one after another. They shared fantastic, creative, thoughtful uses. Things worth celebrating. Things worth learning from. Taking notes at the veterinarian. Prepping for a job interview. Understanding a complex sermon. Creating menus on a budget for a family full of picky eaters and dietary restrictions.

But these folks did not raise their hands as AI users in front of the room. It was not something they wanted to admit out loud.

AI Shame is real. I carry my own version of it.

I've customized an AI agent to become an editor specialized in my particular idiosyncratic writer habits: I overuse the word "that," I tend toward run-on sentences, I hate passive voice, and I want to keep my humor and my style. I'm writing a stage play right now, and I've leaned hard on AI as my continuity editor, making sure I haven't accidentally resurrected a character I killed off three scenes ago. I've used it to help format my scripts into proper play-writing layouts: a task so tedious and mind-numbing that it used to literally prevent me from sharing my work. On days when Writer's Block rears its ugly head? I ask AI to remind me of the half-finished seeds of ideas I told it about in past sessions.

And I feel some kind of shame about all of that.

Even writing this confession now, I fear the folks reading it will think less of me. They'll think I'm lazy, a cheater, a fake. Or they'll shake their heads and tell me about a relative who lost their job due to AI.

Oh, the AI Shame!

Here's the thing, though. That shame is information, but not the information I first assumed. It's not telling me I did something wrong. It's telling me we haven't figured out how to talk about this honestly yet.

The conference reviewer decided that any AI use meant cheating. My roomful of educators decided that honesty wasn't safe. Even me! I decided that my own creative process wasn't worth celebrating.

We all made the same choice. We hid.

And I think we hide because we assume the worst about what AI use means. We frame the use of AI as wearing a mask and pretending to be something we’re not, letting a machine do our thinking, passing off borrowed brilliance as our own.

But that's not what I was doing at that lunch table. That's not what those educators were doing when they lined up after my session. Nobody was wearing a mask.

We were using AI as a mirror.

The AI agent that knows I overuse "that" and can't stop writing run-on sentences? It doesn't make me a different writer. It makes me more myself: a cleaner, less cluttered version of the voice I already had. The continuity editor catching my mistakes doesn't replace my creative vision. It reflects it back to me more clearly. The brainstorming tool that reminds me of my own half-formed ideas? That's my own thinking, returned to me when I need it.

A mask hides who you are. A mirror shows you who you are.

And when we treat every use of AI as mask-wearing, we guarantee that the people using it thoughtfully, as a mirror, will never talk about it. They'll hide. They'll line up after the session instead of raising their hands during it. They'll sit at the lunch table and say nothing.

I sat at that lunch table and said nothing.

This blog post is me not saying nothing anymore.

I used AI to write my conference proposal. I use AI to edit my plays. I use AI to push past Writer's Block and wrestle my scripts into the format publishers expect. I used AI to make sure this article was clear and focused. The voice on this page is mine, not because I didn't use AI, but because I used AI to see my own work more clearly.

So this is me going to take the bag off my head.

Join me?

Danielle Mari Filas is an edtech professional, theatre artist, and former K-12 teacher based in Houston, Texas. She is a Google Education Certified Innovator and a Teacher Consultant with the National Writing Project. Previously, Danielle worked in the Chicago theatre scene, and she has spent her career at the intersection of technology and teaching, looking for ways to embrace one without losing the other. She uses AI every day and is done being quiet about it. You can join her & contact her via email here.