Editor’s Note: Don’t Take Credit For Work AI Did

If you have spent long enough around entrepreneurs -and I have been in this space since 2012, so 14 years and counting- you will have heard it millions of times that ideas are abundant, free, and cheap.

The only thing that they all value is execution.

Execution built Apple, Amazon, Google, SpaceX or Tesla, not simply the ideas behind them.V Execution creates value, but it comes at a high price.

Just recall Musk’s breaking point in 2008, when SpaceX’s first three Falcon 1 launches had failed and the company was running out of money. He later described himself as feeling “closer to a nervous breakdown than he had ever been.” SpaceX somehow managed to scrape together enough resources for one final attempt, and on September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 finally reached orbit.

The feedback on my column, “A Fool With a Tool Is Still a Fool,” was phenomenal, but it also brought out some interesting arguments in favor of AI writing. One was that it’s okay to use AI to organize your thoughts, test an argument, or clean up your writing, as long as the idea itself is yours.

I have to admit, I heard similar justifications from a couple of well-established experts when discussing their recently published books at our event last week.No, people, not just the idea, all of it has to be yours.

Jobs, Musk, and Bezos organized their business plans, tested their products, figured out what was not working, and endlessly fine-tuned them so that today you can use the products and services of Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, and Amazon.

All that work, not simply having the original idea, is what made them some of the world’s best-known founders.

The same goes for writing. Some three weeks ago, Jason Feifer, Editor in Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, made an interesting post on LinkedIn, establishing “A new rule: Don’t lie and say you did something — when AI did it for you.”

I’ll let you read the post yourself, because Feifer uses it to make a different point, but it nevertheless made me feel a little less lonely in this quest not against AI, but against taking credit for work you did not actually do.

I also found comfort in the words of Alain Bejjani, one of the speakers of our Tech Innovation Forum 2026, who said, “AI is the first nonbiological intelligence on planet Earth. In reality, we are now sharing our habitat with a new form of intelligence that, arguably, we can still control. But we all know that we are moving at a pace where we may not be able to control it anymore.”

Perhaps one day, that first non-biological intelligence will get up and start claiming authorship of all the articles and books it actually wrote. That will be fun.

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