You signed it. You own it. That is the only test that matters.

A tightly framed close-up of a printed page on a light oak desk. Three short clean paragraphs of dark grey serif text are visible. In the margin, a handwritten check mark and the short note "Fully agree!" in dark blue ink. At the bottom of the page, a hand holding a black fountain pen is mid-signature.

The argument over what counts as cheating is the wrong argument. Here is the one worth having, and the three questions that settle it.

A friend asked me last week whether it was cheating to have ChatGPT clean up his English before he sent a client memo. He is fluent, not native; the model fixes a stray preposition, tightens a sentence, lifts the register half a notch. He has been doing this for two years. He has never asked the question out loud before.

I asked him whether he uses Grammarly. He laughed. Of course, he uses Grammarly. Everyone uses Grammarly. Grammarly is not cheating; Grammarly is hygiene.

That is the entire debate, in two minutes.

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