Winners don't use ChatGPT

Terence Eden — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 11:34:56 +0000

If you hung around video arcades in your youth, you would have seen this message burned into the phosphor of a thousand dying CRTs.

Obviously this was a devilish psyop by those gits who wanted kids to stop sniffing glue and having fun. The bastards!

But there's a more serious side to the corny message. Are you a winner if you've cheated?

Lance Armstrong "won" multiple Toures de France. It wasn't him that won though, it was a cocktail of drugs and performance enhancers.

Milli Vanilli got to the top of the music charts by having someone else sing their vocals.

You can watch the documentary King of Kong and decide for yourself if allegations of cheating to get high-scores in Donkey Kong are well founded.

The last one is interesting to me. I'm sure everyone here has turned to a gaming walkthough in a moment of frustration. Ah! So that's where the key was hidden! Onwards!

But once you've popped the walkthough cherry, how tempting is it to go back for just one more hit? Only a quick glance… And then, before you know it, you're no longer playing a game; you're watching a movie. You don't achieve anything by following a walkthrough, do you? You're little more than a monkey pressing the buttons in the order they flash.

That's fine if all you want to do is see the ending; but you can't really claim it as an achievement.

The same is true with cheats. ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA and now you have infinite lives and over-powered weapons. So what? You can glide through the game. You won't get any better at playing it. You won't learn. You'll just drift. You won't have any pride and accomplishment in what you've done.

Video games are better than real life. As the meme says:

If you had a cheat button for real life, would you press it?

Click here to suddenly be number one on YouTube.

Swipe here to get into the University of your dreams.

Prompt engineer your way to launching a killer app without knowing how to code.

No work necessary to accomplish anything. Click the cheat button and off you go! Amazing! You'd press it repeatedly, right?

Shiv Ramdas recently posted this provocation about the plagiarist James Somerton:

There's an incredible essay that will break the internet waiting to be written about the throughline between walkthrough dependence, James Somerton and ChatGPT's effect on the human psyche

This isn't that essay. I'm too lazy to write something amazing, and too aware of the limitations of outsourcing my thinking.

But I see the pattern in myself.

I could learn that code's syntax, or I could press the cheat button.
I could plan a trip, or I could press the cheat button.
I could text my wife that I love her, or I could press the cheat button.

I'm sure you're going to write an impassioned comment about why sometimes pressing the cheat button is probably fine. The world is complex and sometimes you need a bit of a helping hand.

But hold onto that hand too long and it will hold you back.

Counterpoint

Do I really believe that?

I'm never going to spend a few years learning French - so I'm quite content to chuck an AI a bit of translation work.

Some people like to spend a morning baking bread. Others like using a bread machine. Is that cheating? Who cares. It is your choice.

Why should I care how you're living your life. It doesn't bother me if you look up spoilers for films, hide a motor in your exercise bike, or always choose easy-mode on your games.

Perhaps you have no imagination and would rather an AI made up a bedtime story for your child. I suspect you're acting like the infamous Wire Mother. A simulation of love with few of the benefits.

I can't imagine using an AI to woo my wife. But then, I've seen Cyrano de Bergerac.

Each of us has to draw a line somewhere. We each find a certain level of cheating acceptable when we do it - and despicable when others get away with it.

Writing Promts – Terence Eden’s Blog

Winners don't use ChatGPT

Counterpoint