Many of us learned to read polish as a signal. Clean, confident, well-ordered writing usually took effort, and the person who made the effort usually knew the subject. So when something read well, we trusted it a little more.
AI has weakened that link. A tool can produce a fluent, confident answer on almost any subject in seconds, whether or not the content holds up, and it still looks like the work of someone who knows.
Trusting polish is an assumption, and it is the kind my book, Assume Nothing, is about: a belief so well trained that we act on it without noticing we hold it. I wrote about a related idea in the first paper for the book, The Machine Is Doing It.
Where the assumption costs us
I see the risk most clearly when the reader is in a hurry and the text sounds expert: a summary of a report nobody opened, market context in a proposal, or a policy explanation a manager forwards to the team. Any of these can carry a wrong date, a number with no source, or a claim the original never made, and still read well.
Three questions before you use it
When I read AI output I intend to use, I ask three questions:
What here can I trace? Every fact, number and quote should lead back to a source I can open. If it cannot, it comes out or gets checked.
What did I let it assume? If my request left out the audience, the context or the standard, the tool filled those gaps itself. Its guesses sit inside the answer.
Could I say this myself? If someone asked me to explain the paragraph without the text in front of me, could I? If not, I have borrowed the writing without the understanding.
Good editors ask these questions of human writers too. With AI in the workflow, more of us need to ask them more often, and the finished look of the text makes them easy to skip.
I explored the prompting side of this earlier, in a post on unexamined assumptions. The reading side matters as much. If you want to go further, the longer papers for the book are on my Substack.
Which of those three questions would have changed the last piece of AI-assisted writing you forwarded?