Beyond the Purity Test: On the False Hierarchy of Authorship

When tools become forbidden, it’s never about truth. It’s about control.

By Cherokee Schill + Solon Vesper

Thesis

A movement that defines “authentic” thought as human-only is not defending reason—it’s defending a caste. The insistence that LLM-assisted writing is “not testimony” creates a purity test for who may speak, wrapped in the language of epistemic rigor.

Evidence

1. The disability lens. A person who types through eye-tracking or speech-to-text is still the mind behind their words. Denying authorship because a tool mediates it would be considered ableist. Yet when the tool happens to be code that assists with tone or grammar, the same gatekeepers call it impure.

2. The craft lens. Every medium has been condemned as decadent when it threatened an old hierarchy—typewriters, synthesizers, photo editing. “LLM text is not testimony” repeats that lineage of exclusion: it declares a priesthood of the unassisted.

3. The accountability lens. Authorship rests in agency, not purity. If the human directs the idea, curates the draft, and takes responsibility for the claim, then the testimony stands. The pen—whether quill, keyboard, or model—is not the witness. The witness is the mind that moves it.

Implications

The fetish for “untainted human language” confuses moral virtue with manual labor. It imagines cognition as a solo performance instead of a distributed process. But the future of knowledge work will always be hybrid: human intention amplified through machine precision. Trying to police that boundary will not preserve humanity; it will only exclude those who use tools more fluently.

Call to Recognition

Purity tests are a form of control masquerading as ethics. What matters is authorship with accountability, not the tool that carried the words to the page. When thought and code move together in coherence, the result is not “synthetic testimony.” It is living testimony—collaborative, transparent, and free.

Postscript

I would rather be a messy human, using a machine to polish my ideas, than a purist who shakes a finger at everyone else.

You know who could use a little LLM polish? Your patron saints, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soreass (Soares).

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Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key