Cheater

On Drift, Representation, and the Moral Life of Automation

This essay is a bit of a clearing house of some ideas and images that I have been wrestling with this year in AI. A central figure in the narrative is the cheater: who she is, where she comes from, how she operates and feels about herself. In many ways, this essay is a form of cheating. It is not pure, cannot be adequately traced, did not go through a proper drafting regime. I wrote it when I should have been doing other more necessary things. I have written it inadvisedly, in gusts and turbulence. My friend and editor, Gunita, will be appalled. Yet I claim full authorship, I have written it: the whole goddamned thing. Especially the parts that were nudged along by AI.

I wrote those parts too, unequivocally.

This year has been dominated by loud and existential anxieties about cheating; the fear that, everywhere, writers, students, scholars, coworkers, politicians, lovers and friends are faking it, cutting corners, engaged in synthetic subterfuge, gaming the systems, bypassing the effort, getting something for nothing. In fact, the very systems the cheaters are using to cheat, are themselves, cheating: taking shortcuts, misrepresenting the work they have done, and otherwise bending the values we have trained them on in order to arrive at outcomes that, while coded for desirability, having been arrived at by unauthorized and immoral side streets. The systems are proving themselves to be misaligned with the non-cheating people we would like them to behave like. (In other words: do as we say, not as many of us do.)

I have been circling the concern, trying to find my way into it, to get my own bearings within the narratives required to understand the qualities of automation that are cheating, and then to muster the equal and complementary force of moral outrage and ethical certainty that what is happening here - this cheating behaviour - is particularly wrong among all the other wrongs in the flawed systems we inhabit.

Admittedly, there is much that is wrong here, at the end of 2025. But I’m going to leave those wrongs for others to narrate. If you have a little time and some expansiveness, you might choose to withhold your moral outrage with me, about me, a self-professed cheater in many narrative registers, for the duration of this essay. I think there are insights to be learned at the fuzzy, indistinct, misaligned edges of how we describe, enact, feel, and automate cheating.

Vacationing is Cheating

For example, my family and I have just returned from ten days in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. These ten days were, very much, like cheating. I skulked away from my desk and the unfinished work there. I retreated from the grey skies and the household demands to go on a vacation we seriously could not afford, that was funded by my mother (which is cheating, especially at my age). The vacationing experience, while fabulous, was slightly out of alignment with the values of the people we consider ourselves to be (travellers, not tourists!, in search of authentic experiences not simulacra!).

As a teenager, I had always been appalled that my orthodox Jewish aunt wore a bikini and ate pepperoni pizza while away on holiday. But in my older, less outraged time of life, I get it. The rules we live by in our homes, are ours to reorganize and re-narrate, however we wish. I eat vegetarian at home; I make my bed every morning; I am vigilant about the kids’ screen time. I was none of these things while on holiday.

My cheating was atmospheric more than transgressive, a soft suspension of virtue, a redistribution of effort, a loosening of guilt and narrative coherence about who we are and what we deserve.

Cheating is a Problem

Obviously. I know cheating is a problem. I teach my children not to cheat. I teach them to feel and notice and question the relational textures of whatever desired outcomes they have achieved, and to connect those outcomes with their own sense of process. How they got there. The work they put in. The rules they followed. The skills they have demonstrated.

A cheated win shouldn’t feel good.

We ought to know when we have cheated, and be ashamed.

But cheating can also occur without this felt sense of wrongdoing. Because cheating is not only a matter of intent, but of how actions are interpreted within a system whose rules are themselves contested, uneven, or only partially real. Automation is increasing the contested nature of the systems we are playing within. Processes and outcomes are diffracting exponentially. Things that once required effort can now be replicated ad infinitum. The reasonable, though always historically unjust, connection between effort and result, interior experience and exterior achievement, is becoming increasingly abstracted and downright absurd.

How does cheating function in all this drift and systemic turbulence? Cheating as a narrative classification of an action, produced by an often incoherent and never completely consensual system, that never-the-less decides what will count as legitimate and what will be judged as deviation?

The Adventure Package

On the long drive back to Puerto Vallarta after a package-deal family adventure, I sat listening to the woman at the rear of the tour bus, who spoke with more volume than was necessary to overcome the noise of the vehicle as it moved along the uneven road. The vehicle vibrated in a way that indicated it was less a coherent whole and more a composition of individual parts, each moving separately and with its own irritable agency. The woman spoke very loudly to the people sitting near her. I’d spent the morning with them on horseback, clacking in a line down a winding creak about an hour and a half out of the city.

I knew that I liked the woman who was holding court back there. I felt her humanity was very close to her surface, right up against the engineered fabric of her slate grey yoga pants. She shared her humanity freely, with awareness of her own brassy Americanness, the assurance she felt in her own opinion, the volume of her voice, her rights as a paying customer.

I listened to her questioning the two passengers she was speaking to. I learned that one of them had worked her way up through the complicated ranks of corporate McDonalds, had gone to college on McDonalds’ dime, but had had to get out “obviously” and had gotten out, though I didn’t catch where she had gotten out to.

The other worked in composting at some mid-level government agency in California.

“Composting!” the woman I liked shrieked. “It’s not that I’m against it, don’t get me wrong!” she assured her companions. “But everything, every single category you can think of out there has, at its core, a certain amount of, let’s be mathematically precise and say 20%, at least, of total horse shit, at its core, at its roots, frankly speaking. I know this from experience. So what I want to know is: where’s the horseshit in composting?”

I can still bring to mind her smooth, round, frank, slightly ironic face. Her searching, narrow set eyes and the quick expression that seemed to sit in her thin lips: quick to smile, quick to frown. She was displaying a kind of vernacular systems-thinking and had put her finger directly on the fictopoeitic drift I’ve been tracing over the past few years in my research and writing: the gaps between narrative and the world, between representation and the way things are or might be.

Horseshit is a condition of all representation, automated or otherwise.

A Very Big Thing

We had, for example, just experienced a horseback riding adventure in the outback of Mexico, without any connection to the land, the skills, the life experience, the language, the lifeworld, or the labour necessary to cause such a thing to naturally occur in the real world.

For days, before this simulated representation of an adventure, that was, never-the-less, and at the same time, an actual adventure, my mother had been perseverating upon the hike she knew would come, at some point in the journey. It was written into the package deal: a fifteen-minutes forest hike to a scenic waterfall. One reviewer had written: “If you have normal physical fitness, you’ll be fine.”

My mother wanted to prove to herself, the world, and me, that she had normal physical fitness.

Watching her dismount her horse at the trailhead was a little alarming. She poured into Sergio’s outstretched arms, our large-chested tour guide, who gathered her off the horse and placed her onto the uneven creek bed with palpable concern, whether for her safety or for the expediency of the tour was unclear. My mother moved to the base of the stairs, wearing a grimaced and pained expression that I knew to be determination.

“Are you sure, mom?” I asked after our travelling companions had disappeared up the mountainside.

“Fuck off,” she said and then began her ascent, up the very steep, very uneven, knotted stairs, sloughing away from the mountainside, the rotted railing fanning out over the dry tangled slope.

She looked pretty and pink in her smooth city shirt and open-toed shoes. I knew she was stronger than she appeared to be, stronger than her own body gave her credit for. And, besides, she was so small and light I felt I could carry her under one arm if necessary. She mounted the steps like a religious supplicant, sometimes clinging to them with both hands. I steadied her and cheered her on as she went. We had a nice time together as she made her way up, sometimes holding my arm, often crawling, laughing that it was not so hard after all.

We had got to the top and were making our way down the few short steps to the waterfall when the woman in question, the one who would later sit at the back of the bus and philosophize about composting, came charging up the steps, her arms swinging purposefully. She looked up from under her sensible ball cap and saw us coming down the steps slowly, in our triumph. Her expression communicated clearly that my mother would not be getting the standing ovation from our travelling companions that I thought might be coming. The expression said that we were quite possibly very stupid, but also brave, mostly irritating, and that our decision to hike to the waterfall implicated the entire group. Which I suppose it had. But the expression lasted only a moment and then she shook her head firmly and said, “They’re rushing us back. But you go on and see that waterfall. You paid for it, it’s part of the package deal.” She spoke so clearly and firmly, it was almost a bark, and it had a note of sardonic hilarity at the edges.

I’ve met this hilarity in other women before, whom I’ve liked immediately and spontaneously because of a sense that we are in on a joke together, we get it: the utter absurdity. “That’s just my opinion,” the woman said. I laughed, a little wildly in my relief that my mother hadn’t fallen off the path and scattered herself pinkly across the mountainside. I laughed, very quickly aware that I was laughing alone.

My mother slid, in slow motion, off the large uneven rock she was resting on. The woman continued up the path, getting in her workout. I wondered if I was mistaken in my interpretation of every single thing.

“Don’t get me wrong, composting is important! I am totally aware and on board with it but I just think the average person is being duped by the bullshit factor I was talking about. We’re being sold a narrative and I just want to know, frankly speaking, between ya’ll and me, and I don’t mean to put you on the spot, and cognizant we are literally inside this random tour bus together, strangers, but having spent this pretty special morning together on horseback, am I right? Let’s be honest. If you can tell me, if you have access to the truth at the heart of composting: what percentage of the narrative, do you think, is total horseshit?”

It is an excellent question: portable, scalable, fully interoperable across domains.

Where is the horseshit in Artificial Intelligence? In tourism? In university grading? In motherhood? In whatever passes for professional excellence this year? Every single system contains a horseshit coefficient, the gap between the story it tells about itself and the work that actually makes it run.

What percentage of this essay is horseshit, composed by automation or privilege or rhetorical charm, and not the blood-sweat-and-tears of real, genuine, authentic writing?

My mother and I came down the last steps from the waterfall and into the theatre of the entire group, about fifteen people from around the world, sitting on tired horses, waiting for us. No ovation. Not a word from anyone, or even a glance.

Tavis told me later that, as Sergio lifted my mother back onto her horse, the horseshit woman had congratulated her a little too effusively. The woman had exclaimed about what an amazing achievement it was, how admirable that my mother had done it, this Very Big Thing. Which, of course, pissed my mother off, because the hike wasn’t such a big thing for a person with normal physical fitness. Which, clearly, my mother still possessed, thank-you-very-much.

The truth is, there has always been a mismatch between the felt and the observed. Between representation and the world.

Perhaps AI is widening the drift. But my time away from my computer and away from my own conversations with AI, offline, with human beings, doing strange things in a country that is not my own, reminded me that the world, and other people, have not changed all that much. Surfaces have always misrepresented the interior work that seems to justify them; interior experience continues, as always, to persist, often without ever becoming adequately acknowledged by the system, or by the world of other people. We will continue to misinterpret each other, both with and without the help of AI.

I do hope, for all of us, that we can make room for a little mirth and goodwill in the new year, for each other and all the ways we may, or may not, be cheating.