Don't say anything, but...

Nearly everyone you know is doing something they'd rather you didn't know about.

You can tell because of how it comes up. It's the lowered voice and the furtive look round before "don't say anything, but". The weight loss jab gets mentioned the way you'd talk about an affair. AI gets mentioned the way you'd confess to watching the film instead of reading the book. Ten minutes later that same person will be tutting at someone else for doing exactly what they've just confessed to.

We've started judging each other with the enthusiasm the puritans brought to burning witches.

Someone loses three stone and the first thing anyone wants to know is whether “he did it properly”. Someone sends over a decent proposal and the first thing anyone wants to know is whether she wrote it herself. Nobody asks whether it's good, or whether it worked, or whether he feels better. They want to know if you suffered for it, and if you didn't they want it noted!

We've even got a word for the AI version now. AI slop. It started as a hunt for the em dash, which became the giveaway, the lipstick on the collar of LinkedIn posts, and it's grown into a whole charge sheet. The rhythm of your writing, the neat threes, the little "it's not this, it's that" flourish at the end of a paragraph. There are entire LinkedIn threads devoted to catching people out. Shall we perhaps all just grow up and admit it's quite nice to have some new tools in the box?

Because that is all they are. Tools.
Something that lets a person do a thing they couldn't do before, or couldn't do well, or couldn't do without a fight. We have never had a problem with that in principle. The trouble is these particular tools touch something deeper than convenience. They get at how we think we're supposed to earn our worth. We feel like cheats when we get help with the thing that was supposed to prove something about us. Weight is supposed to prove willpower, control and a lack of laziness. Writing is supposed to prove we're educated, smart and strategic. Nobody has ever felt guilty about the dishwasher because nobody ever thought washing up said anything about who you were.

And we have been here so many times before, which is what makes the current fuss so interesting.

The tools keep advancing and we don't.

In the 1950s colouring your hair was something actresses and a 'certain kind of woman' did, because your hair was supposed to prove what kind of woman you were. Clairol built its whole campaign on the secrecy. "Does she or doesn't she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure." Twenty years later about half of women were doing it and now? Literally no one cares. The product hadn't changed, the shame had just worn out.

Cake mix arrived and didn't sell because it was too easy, and a cake was supposed to prove you were a “proper wife”. The story goes that once they took the powdered egg out and made you crack a real one it flew, because you had to feel like you'd done something. Whether that's exactly what happened or just a good story that stuck, the instinct is real and I think it's the right one. Cracking the egg is the bit where you make it yours, and the same goes for an AI draft. The people who rewrite it in their own words aren't being precious, they're doing the work.

Calculators were banned from exams and are now compulsory. Sat nav was for people who couldn't read a map (hands up) and is now everybody. Spell check. Ready meals. Botox, which people denied for a decade and now mention over lunch. Tutors, which every middle class parent uses and nobody discusses at the school gate. All of them went through the same stages, secret, then judged, then normal, and the only thing that ever moved the timing was how visible it got. Once enough people could see enough other people doing it, the judgement had nothing left to feed on. And every one of them won for the same reason. They worked.

That's roughly where the jabs and the AI are now, somewhere between secret and judged and, I think, a lot closer to normal than it feels. It's hard to keep AI quiet when the tell is in half the emails you get in a week. It's hard to keep the jab quiet when a fifth of the office has changed shape since Easter.

But here's the bit that should concern our puritanical world more than the judgement, and it's the reason the judgement matters. The secrecy is stopping people learning how to use the things.

When nobody around you will admit to being on a GLP1, the only people talking to you about it are the ones selling you something. The app that wants a subscription, the "GLP1 friendly" protein powder, the influencer with a supplement code. What you don't get is the friend who's six months in. The one who tells you that you have to eat better than you ever have or you'll lose muscle along with the fat and feel dreadful, and that barely eating is the wrong lesson however fast the scales move. Same with the kid who can't say they used AI on their homework. Nobody shows them the difference between getting an answer and understanding one. A study of 27,000 pupils this year found homework scores went up 18 per cent once they started using AI and exam scores fell 20 per cent within six months. The shame doesn't stop anyone using the tool. It just stops them using it well, because the people who could help are the ones they're hiding it from, and the people who fill the gap have something to sell.

So where I've got to is this - there's no shame in using tools, and these two are just the extraordinary examples getting the attention right now. But tools will never replace real work. The jab still needs you to look after the body and the AI still needs a mind to direct it. So maybe less judgement and more curiosity is once again the answer, because one thing I know for sure is that in a few years nobody will care about the jab or the em dash. We'll be far too busy judging the next thing.