Artificial Intelligence and the Bullshit Revolution
How AI has democratized bullshit and what to do about it
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming writing, for better and worse. Its full impact remains unclear, but at least one thing is now apparent: AI has revolutionized bullshit. It has empowered anyone with an internet connection to produce mass amounts of high-quality bullshit at unprecedeneted speed and with minimal effort.
Bullshit creates the impression of substance. Bullshitting isn’t lying, exactly. The liar knows and hides the truth, while the bullshitter is indifferent to it. Bullshit may or may not reflect reality—it doesn’t matter. The bullshitter’s goal is to advance an agenda by impressing or manipulating the audience.
We’ve all encountered bullshit: Leaders who talk in buzzwords to sound visionary; Academics who use indecipherable prose to appear profound; Bureaucrats who fill reports with jargon to obscure inaction; Influencers who feign expertise; Politicians who speak in vague platitudes; Students who fill essays with big words to hide their lack of understanding. Bullshit is everywhere.
A brief history of bullshit
Humans have been bullshitting each other for centuries. An early example comes from ancient Greece. In Encomium of Helen, Gorgias of Leontini argues Helen of Troy should not be blamed for the Trojan War because she was compelled by fate, the gods, love, or persuasive speech. However, his argument relies on rhetorical flourish rather than evidence or reasoning. Gorgias aims to dazzle rather than prove. Classic bullshit.
The nature of bullshit hasn’t changed over the centuries, but technology and education have changed how people produce and share it. Bullshit has progressively democratized, making it easier for anyone to create and spread.
The printing press enabled people to mass produce information, accelerating the spread of bullshit. As literacy rates increased, more people gained access to bullshit and the means to produce it. Mass media—radio and television—expanded bullshit’s reach by prioritizing entertainment value and emotional appeal in widely accessible formats.
In the last few decades, the internet supercharged bullshit’s democratization by removing barriers to mass distribution. Before the internet, few people could produce a bullshit book, picture, radio broadcast, or video, and even fewer could afford to market and distribute it. Today, anyone can produce and distribute a digital version of these things and market it for free through social media.
But it turns out the internet didn’t just enable free-for-all bullshittery—it also became the raw material for the next leap forward.
Artificial intelligence: A quantum leap in bullshit
In the process of empowering billions of people to consume and produce bullshit, the internet became the largest, most accessible bullshit repository in human history. This ocean of bullshit provides data for training modern AI models. Using sophisticated algorithms, AI tools consume massive amounts of our bullshit, repackage it, and feed it back to us. And we marvel.
But AI-powered bullshit is different from the past. To be sure, AI has given us a quantitative leap in bullshittery, allowing more people to produce more bullshit faster. But the printing press, mass media, and the internet did the same thing in their time. What sets AI apart is the qualitative leap it represents. AI tools make it easy for anyone to produce polished, sophisticated, high-level bullshit with minimal effort.
Before AI, producing good bullshit was hard because it required above average writing skills. Good writing has four essential elements:
Substance: Advances ideas supported by strong evidence and sound reasoning.
Organization: Arranges the ideas logically.
Style: Uses clear language that’s easy to read and understand.
Correctness: Uses conventional grammar, spelling, punctuation, and mechanics.
We can arrange these elements on a spectrum based on whether they correspond more to the writing’s surface-level artifacts or the meaning it conveys:
Bullshit, by definition, lacks substance and meaning, so success depends on getting surface-level artifacts right. The bullshitter preys on our tendency to use the representativeness heuristic—judging something by comparing it to a familiar prototype. We use surface-level cues, like grammar and spelling, as a proxy for substance. Sloppy writing = poor substance.
The bullshitter fools us by aligning surface-level artifacts with what we expect from substantively good writing. In other words, bullshit looks right. Before AI, this was hard to do. The bullshitter needed to be a capable writer—one who could logically organize ideas, use a broad vocabulary, and apply correct grammar and spelling. Bullshitting required skills.
AI, however, changed the game by severing the link between errors and substance. Today, people don’t need writing skills to produce convincing bullshit, just computer access. AI tools can produce grammatically perfect writing with complex language and a solid structure—everything needed for convincing bullshit. And they can do it exponentially faster than humans. Artificial intelligence has become the greatest bullshitter in the history of humankind.
Detecting bullshit in the age of AI
Military professionals are as vulnerable to AI-generated bullshit as everyone else—perhaps even more so because representativeness judgments pervade military culture: Looks good in a uniform = good soldier; Runs fast = good leader; Smooth briefer = knows their stuff; Tall man = senior leader potential.
This tendency to rely on easy but often flawed heuristics extends to writing. For example, US Army regulations define effective writing as:
Easy to understand in one reading
Clear, concise, and well-organized
Puts the main point upfront
Uses active voice
Uses short words
Keeps sentences to 15 words or less
Avoids jargon
Uses correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation
Good advice—but also perfectly compatible with bullshit.
Too many military writers and leaders judge writing by these or similar heuristics, often over-relying on correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. But AI can produce grammatically perfect writing effortlessly, no substance required. If surface-level artifacts are your only bullshit detectors, you may be swimming in bullshit without even smelling it.
Don’t be fooled by bullshit
The modern challenge for military professionals is detecting bullshit when traditional heuristics no longer work. Readers and leaders must recognize when writing seems polished and correct, but the substance doesn’t hold up. Writers and staff officers must recognize when an AI tool is feeding them bullshit by producing text that looks right but lacks depth, reasoning, and genuine analysis.
Fortunately, we already have the means to detect AI-generated bullshit: strong writing skills. Strong writers know that grammatically perfect bullshit is still bullshit. They don’t rely on simple heuristics or allow themselves to be fooled by flashy writing. Instead, they use critical thinking to go beyond surface-level artifacts, carefully scrutinizing the writing’s substance.
I’m not against AI, but I am against bullshit. AI can help us write faster and more efficiently. With skilled prompting, it can even improve the substance of our writing. Paired with strong writing skills, AI can be a powerful tool.
But strong writing skills are more important than ever. AI hasn’t diminished their value; it has amplified it. Strong writing skills are the modern-day bullshit detector, helping you spot bullshit and keeping you from producing it.