People Taking Credit For AI-Generated Solutions

People are increasingly taking full credit for solutions and answers generated by artificial intelligence systems even when their only contribution was posing a question or prompt. com reported on May 11, 2026, that this trend involves users of large language models presenting AI outputs as the result of their own intellectual effort.

The column notes that in many cases the AI performs the substantive work while the human provides minimal input. The distinction between shared collaboration and minimal prompting has become a point of discussion. When a person engages in extended back-and-forth dialogue with an AI system, jointly refining prompts and critiquing responses, some argue the human can reasonably share credit for the final result.

However, when a user simply asks the AI to solve a problem and then claims the solution as their own, the apportionment of credit is less clear.

This practice appears frequently in educational settings. Students use systems such as ChatGPT, GPT-5, Claude, CoPilot, Gemini or Grok to generate solutions to algebraic equations or to write essays on topics such as the Declaration of Independence.

They then submit the AI-generated work under their own name without meaningful interaction with the tool. In professional environments, similar patterns occur. The column presents an example in which an employee struggling to explain declining customer retention enters data into an AI system.

The AI identifies a pattern linking the drop to changes in the onboarding process. The employee then presents the finding to a manager as the result of their own analysis without mentioning the AI's role. The worker stated to the manager that the discovery required significant concentrated thinking.

The manager praised the worker for ingenuity. No reference was made to the artificial intelligence system that had examined the data and produced the chart showing the cause.