The Two Woodenheads

Within a few days, two loud verdicts have been pronounced on the same affair. The one, an Austrian plagiarism hunter, sees fraud and intellectual emptiness everywhere. The other, a Berlin publicist, sees woodenheads and technophobia everywhere. They appear as adversaries — and that is the trick. They are the same move, twice, mirrored. And precisely because they contradict each other so bitterly, together they make invisible the very question at issue.

Look first at how they speak, before you hear what they say. The hunter speaks of a “text culture without a brain” and of the “intellectual emptiness” of the political and media elite. The publicist speaks of “woodenheads”, of “Amish People”, of a “herd animal” in the German media forest. Both replace the strongest version of the opponent with a caricature of his character; both are polemicists of contempt. The mirror sits in the tone long before it sits in the conclusion.

The Three Charges, Once More

In »The New Hunting Ground« we separated three charges that are tangled into a single knot in the AI quarrel. The first: the concealed origin — whoever publishes under his own name a text a machine wrote, leaving the public to believe that he himself thinks and formulates, deceives. This charge holds. The second: the unnamed source — the machine draws on foreign thoughts it cannot name, and mere disclosure does not entirely cure this. This charge is subtle and serious. The third: the inference from a machine's involvement to worthlessness — a genetic fallacy, an aesthetic prejudice in the costume of integrity. This charge is the weakest. Three axes, cleanly separated. Whoever keeps them apart arrives at a verdict. Whoever collapses them arrives at a pose.

How the Hunter Collapses

Weber throws everything together downward, into the first and the third charge at once: everything is fraud, and everything is brainless. He is right in one thing — undisclosed use in a profession that lives on trust in authorship is a real breach. But he drowns this true point in the contempt of the third, conducts his proof with a probability detector that is no truth machine, and hunts along a political line. So the justified core becomes a chase in which the question of guilt is no longer even posed, only carried out.

How the Advocate Collapses

Steingart throws everything in the opposite direction: everything is mere technophobia. He too is right in one thing, and we grant it to him as unreservedly as we did in the essay itself. When the FAZ describes artificial intelligence as a “technology parasitically exploiting human creations”, that is the third charge in pure culture — the aesthetic disgust that takes itself for an argument. This mockery he has earned, and the mockery lands. But then Steingart performs the mirror image of Weber's deed: he collapses the whole affair into the negation of the third charge — and in doing so erases the first. “One should praise the minister for using the technology rather than hold a rule-breach against him.” With that, the concealed origin is summarily redefined as the persecution of an innocent.

The Witness Who Refutes the Advocate

The beautiful thing is that the case Steingart himself adduces refutes him. With Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger, an article published under his name in the Handelsblatt came almost entirely from an AI, a piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in large part, a speech before the Atlantic Council entirely — and the AI use was not disclosed to the editorships. The ministry confirmed it. This is not technophobia persecuting an innocent; this is precisely the first charge, the concealed origin, conceded by the one who caused it. Steingart looks at a confession of non-disclosure and calls it Amish persecution.

And the ministry's defence is the real hit: one accounts for AI use no differently than for word processing or research tools. That is, word for word, the “tool, not author” move we named as the method by which the disclosure question is made to vanish. The minister who hides his AI authorship from the editorships and pleads “only a tool”, and the publicist who praises him for it, are playing the same move: dissolving authorship into tool-use so that the question “concealed or named?” can no longer be posed.

Why Two Adversaries Make the Same Move

Here lies the core. Two men who despise each other need the same thing — the disappearance of the question. The hunter needs it because his business is the hunt; a calm, settled disclosure norm yields no trophies. The advocate needs it because his business is the normalisation of machine-produced texts; a disclosure norm would point back at him. His own newsletter is automated — and not only it. Whoever is on his mailing lists knows the personal-looking letters with his signature that address one as though he had taken up the pen himself. Such simulated own-handedness is everywhere standard today, no personal scandal; yet in the quarrel over the disclosure of machine authorship it casts a particular light on the sender. For the signature is the oldest mark by which a person vouches — I stand behind this, in my own hand. To automate it is to use the sign of personal authenticity in order to conceal the machine origin: the exact inversion of the fourth way. With that, the generous question of whether his automation is openly declared becomes moot. Where the whole effect rests on the recipient not noticing the machine, nothing is declared. The man who mocks the demand for disclosure as wooden technophobia lives from a business whose very function is the concealed origin. So he is no neutral observer but a party. The hunter and the advocate, enemies in tone, are allies in function: both keep the disclosure question open, because an answered question feeds neither of them any longer.

The Vehicle and the Cargo

And beneath the technological quarrel, with both of them, a politics travels. Weber's hunt sits on an existing apparatus of takedown and on a line that reaches as far as joint appearances with the FPÖ. Steingart's acquittal issues into the narrative against “conserving, subsidising, archiving”, crowned by twenty charts on the bloated state and Europe's technological lag. “Brainlessness” and “courage for technology” are the morally coded prefixes; the cargo beneath is in both cases a political economy. The AI question is the costume, not the body.

The Spectacle as a Vent

With that the essential is said. Weber versus Steingart is not a debate but a vent. The loud, polarised pair allows the reader to discharge into contempt for the other tribe and to carry off the feeling of having taken a side — while the only thing that would cost anyone something, a binding disclosure standard, remains untouched. The spectacle of the quarrel is precisely the mechanism by which the question goes unanswered. Weber's overreach hands Steingart the convenient caricature; Steingart's blanket acquittal hands Weber his “see, they defend the cheats”. They feed each other, and both live on the fact that nothing is decided.

The Fourth Way

There is a position that neither of them needs and neither can see, because it dissolves both their businesses: openly named, shared, owned co-authorship. Not the hunt, not the acquittal — the declaration. The minister would have had only to write a single sentence: this text was produced with the help of AI. The publicist would have only to stop hiding the machine behind his signature, and to say what his newsletter is. The disclosure that takes the object from the hunt is the same that makes the acquittal superfluous. Between the two woodenheads stands the simplest sentence of the whole affair — and it is the sentence both do not want spoken, because, once spoken, it would put them both out of work.