“The Decade of the Great Fraud”

John Swygert
July 17, 2026

I saw an advertisement the other day for an app that promises to “humanize” writing produced by artificial intelligence.

Think about that for a moment.

First, you ask an AI to write something for you. Then you feed that writing into another program so it can disguise the fact that an AI wrote it. The second machine deliberately adds enough human irregularity, personality, awkwardness, and imperfection to make the first machine’s work appear authentic.

Artificial intelligence writes it.

Artificial intelligence falsifies its origin.

A human takes credit.

Welcome to “The Decade of the Great Fraud.”

I am publishing that expression today, July 17, 2026, because I have a strong feeling we are going to hear some version of it repeatedly in the years ahead. When it starts appearing everywhere, this post will at least establish when I publicly used it.

This does not mean artificial intelligence itself is fraudulent. AI can be an extraordinary tool. I use it constantly. It can help people organize their thoughts, improve their writing, research ideas, develop inventions, analyze problems, and express things they may not otherwise be able to communicate clearly.

The fraud begins when the tool is deliberately concealed and the manufactured result is presented as proof of someone’s personal effort, ability, sincerity, knowledge, or character.

There is something wonderfully ridiculous about using a machine to write your words and then paying another machine to make those words look less machine-made.

That is not merely editing.

That is counterfeit authenticity.

We are entering an era in which nearly everything can be generated, filtered, rewritten, staged, enhanced, corrected, and optimized before another human being sees it.

Photographs no longer necessarily show what was standing in front of the camera.

Videos no longer necessarily show something that happened.

Voices no longer necessarily belong to the people speaking.

Reviews may not come from customers.

Followers may not be people.

Messages may not have been written by the sender.

Songs may not have been performed by the named artist.

Applicants may not possess the skills demonstrated in their applications.

Students may not understand the papers submitted under their names.

Politicians may not have spoken the words that appear beneath their faces.

Companies may use artificial friendliness to apologize for problems created by automated systems designed to prevent customers from reaching a real person.

Everybody is presenting evidence of humanity while steadily removing the human from the process.

That is why “The Decade of the Great Fraud” fits.

The fraud is not always a total lie. That would almost be easier to recognize. The modern fraud is often something real that has been altered just enough to create a false impression.

A real face with a synthetic body.

A real opinion rewritten by a machine.

A real photograph with the inconvenient people removed.

A real accomplishment exaggerated by artificial presentation.

A real person represented by a carefully engineered digital character who is happier, wealthier, smarter, younger, more attractive, more successful, and far less confused than the person operating the account.

The lie is increasingly found not in the object itself, but in what we are encouraged to believe about how it was created.

That distinction matters.

There is nothing dishonest about saying, “I used AI to help organize and improve this.”

There is something dishonest about commanding a machine to create the work, running that work through another machine specifically designed to conceal its origin, and then presenting the result as an untouched demonstration of your own ability.

The advertisement that inspired this piece essentially said:

Let artificial intelligence write everything for you.

Then let us make it look as though it did not.

That is hilarious.

It is also a perfect symbol of the age.

We have spent years teaching machines to imitate people. We are now teaching machines to imitate the imperfections that prove a person was involved.

Soon the misplaced comma may be artificial.

The awkward sentence may be strategically inserted.

The unnecessary repetition may be generated to establish credibility.

The misspelled word may be a premium feature.

Perhaps the most advanced AI writing service will eventually advertise:

Now with 37% more believable human mistakes.

The strange part is that genuine human expression has never been perfect. People repeat themselves. They wander. They contradict themselves. They use unusual phrases. They become emotional. They say something brilliant beside something clumsy. Their writing contains fingerprints.

Those fingerprints are now being studied, copied, packaged, and sold back to us as authenticity.

I have seen language spread before. Years ago, I used the term “cord cutter” on my blog to describe someone who stopped subscribing to traditional television and used devices such as Roku instead. The post was widely read. Months later, I began seeing “cord cutter” everywhere.

I also remember saying and writing “cray cray” as an abbreviation of “crazy crazy” before I heard everyone else using it. Could I prove that I originated either expression? Probably not. Trying too hard to prove you invented “cray cray” would make you sound completely cray cray.

Language moves through society in strange ways. Someone says something. Someone else remembers it without remembering where it came from. It gets repeated, altered, and absorbed until it seems as though it always existed.

That is part of the fun of publishing an expression such as “The Decade of the Great Fraud.” The timestamp remains even if the origin eventually disappears.

And the phrase is not meant to suggest that every person has suddenly become malicious. Most people are simply trying to survive inside systems that reward appearances more than reality.

Schools reward completed assignments.

Employers reward polished résumés.

Social media rewards attention.

Politics rewards emotional reaction.

Advertising rewards persuasion.

Algorithms reward engagement.

Very few of these systems stop to ask whether the thing being rewarded is authentic.

So people learn to manufacture the evidence that the system demands.

Then the system becomes filled with fabricated evidence and begins making decisions based upon it.

That is where the joke becomes dangerous.

When fraud becomes easy enough, inexpensive enough, and socially acceptable enough, truth must work harder merely to prove that it exists.

The honest photograph needs verification.

The genuine voice needs authentication.

The original writer must somehow prove authorship.

The real victim must compete with fabricated evidence.

The qualified applicant must compete against machine-created résumés.

The truthful person begins to sound suspicious simply because everyone has become accustomed to polished deception.

We may eventually reach the absurd point where the most believable proof that something was created by a human is that it is imperfect, emotional, slightly disorganized, and occasionally says “fuck” for no strategically optimized reason.

Perhaps humanity’s final watermark will be the refusal to sound like a corporate mannequin.

Artificial intelligence will help create extraordinary things during this decade. It will also help create extraordinary quantities of nonsense, manipulation, impersonation, counterfeit expertise, artificial intimacy, and manufactured sincerity.

The technology is not automatically the fraud.

The fraud is pretending that the technology was not used.

The fraud is replacing reality and continuing to label the replacement as real.

The fraud is selling artificial humanity to people who have been trained to distrust actual human imperfection.

So here it is, published and timestamped:

The 2020s may ultimately be remembered as “The Decade of the Great Fraud”—the period when humanity gained the power to manufacture nearly every form of evidence and then acted surprised when nobody knew what to believe.