Nearly Half Would Hide AI Use at Work, Yet Demand Others Disclose It—Survey Reveals Growing Hypocrisy

Nearly half of adults would hide AI use in their work, even though most say others should not

Nearly half of adults surveyed would publish AI-generated work without disclosing it, even though a majority believe others should do exactly that. The contradiction sits at the centre of a new survey from Use.AI, an AI aggregation platform that polled 7,200 adults across the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, and Latin America. The results, published on July 30, suggest that attitudes toward AI authorship are splitting faster than workplace norms can keep up. Forty-six percent of respondents said they would not reveal that AI played a role in work presented under their own name. Yet 54 percent said other people should disclose when they use AI for equivalent tasks. The gap between what people expect of others and what they practise themselves mirrors a pattern researchers have been documenting for months. The survey also explored when people feel entitled to call AI output their own. Sixty-nine percent said the work belongs to them if they supplied the instructions and approved the final version, while 74 percent felt the same after revising AI-generated material. Seventy-one percent said taking responsibility for accuracy was enough to claim authorship. Use.AI sells a platform that aggregates multiple AI models into a single interface, which means the company has a commercial interest in normalising AI use. Its Managing Director, Ihor Herasymov, framed the findings as evidence that people already see themselves as authors when they guide AI, but the survey's methodology, including its sampling method and margin of error, was not disclosed in the accompanying press release. That gap makes it difficult to assess how representative the results truly are. Other research points in the same direction. Atlassian found that workers who disclose AI use are judged ten times lazier by colleagues, a finding that helps explain why many choose to stay quiet. A Harvard Business Review analysis published in June concluded that employees hide AI usage largely because they fear professional consequences, not because they lack awareness of disclosure norms. A separate ResumeBuilder survey found that nearly 63 percent of workers have never told their managers that AI was doing part of their job. Half of Gen Z workers report feeling guilty about using AI, even as employers increasingly rank AI skills above a university degree. The disconnect between private behaviour and public expectation is consistent across age groups and geographies. The timing is notable. The European Union's AI Act transparency rules took effect on August 2, requiring companies to label AI-generated content that could pass for authentic, with fines reaching three percent of global turnover for non-compliance. The regulation targets deepfakes and synthetic media rather than workplace documents, but it signals a broader regulatory push toward mandatory disclosure that may eventually reach professional settings. For now, the gap between belief and behaviour remains wide. People overwhelmingly think AI use should be disclosed, just not by them, and workplaces have yet to produce rules clear enough to close the distance.

Half of adults admit they would publish work created mainly by AI and not say so -- despite believing other people should do just that

* Over two-thirds (69%) of people believe AI generated material can be presented as their own work if they provided the prompt and approved the final version * Meanwhile, 54% believe AI-based work should be clearly marked * 7,200 adults were surveyed, located across the US, the European Union, the UK, and Latin America A growing disparity in how AI generated content, tasks, and tools are assigned ownership and expectations on accurately marking their origins is emerging, according to a new survey by Use.AI. Furthermore, the findings indicate an emerging dichotomy between human-claimed authorship of an AI work and clear labeling of the work as AI. Different attitudes based on settings for the AI work have also been identified, such as private emails and school or professional reports. The chicken or the prompt? The developing adoption of AI appears to be introducing new attitudes to acceptable creativity, with the emerging model of what is described as "authorship by direction," where the AI is trusted to create a first draft, which is then revised and claimed by a human. The statistics shared by Use.AI - a tool that aggregates AI models into a single interface - highlight how AI is being used more extensively, with a human-originating prompt leading to drafts and versions from the machine, followed by editing from the human. While the AI has contributed, only a human name appears on the finished product, which raises questions of ownership and authorship. "AI is separating the production of work from the ownership of it. People are increasingly prepared to direct the process, approve the result and take the credit, but there is still no shared standard for when AI's role should be visible to everyone else," says Use.AI's Managing Director, Ihor Herasymov. With 69% of those surveyed considering AI-generated work their own if they produced the prompt, 46% claiming they would keep AI involvement with their work under wraps, and 54% feeling AI use should be disclosed, we're some way from agreement on AI use across creative tasks. Authorship vs. editorship Herasymov's observations point to a constantly evolving set of standards around the creation and use of AI-generated materials. Interestingly, this is happening against a backdrop of growing unease over the use of AI in creative tasks. The implications of claiming ownership of automated work generated upon instructions to an LLM trained on as much human writing, art, music, and cinema as possible are considerable, and go way beyond questions of ethics. Copyright is just one element, and the most obvious, but we're also moving into a landscape where inputting a prompt on employer-owned hardware takes authorship away from the person at the keyboard. Ultimately, the task of prompting and revising means anyone using AI in this way stops being the author, and becomes the editor - and that is before the true ownership of the output is determined. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.