Maybe stop using ChatGPT as an insult now?
- Haroon Riaz
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
“Did you use ChatGPT for this?”
That line is not sharp. It is outdated. And yes, still active as we approach the end of 2025. It was probably relevant a couple of years ago.
By now, every serious team is using ChatGPT somewhere in the process. Just like Photoshop. Just like Google. It is not a novelty. It is infrastructure.
The truth is that ChatGPT is already on your phone. It autocompletes your email and texts. It shapes your search results. It writes half the ads that follow you online. Pretending you can sniff it out and call it an insult is like pretending you can spot “Google” in a strategy deck.
The critique should never be about the tool. It should be about the choices.
What problem did it solve?
Where did the human make the hard calls?
What got refined?
What got rejected?
Where is the fingerprint?
That fingerprint is what still matters. Taste. Tension. Surprise. Soul. Without it, the work would be weak even without AI. With it, the work carries weight no matter what tools were in play.
Give the same prompt to a hundred people and you will get a hundred look-alike outputs.
Give it to someone with vision and you will see the difference. That is the fingerprint test.
The lazy critique reveals more about the critic than the work. It shows you are behind. It shows you do not understand the world you are entering… the world you are already living in.
Retire that line. Update the rubric. Embrace ChatGPT. Judge the idea, not the infrastructure.
Ask if the work moves you. Ask if it carries a fingerprint. Then ask the only question that matters. Does it move you?
Destroy the editing, all right. Get mad at leftover ChatGPT instructions if your team’s laziness bugs you.
Say what is missing. Say what must change. Ask for a stronger idea. Ask for a clearer arc. Ask for a real fingerprint.
The work gets better when the questions get better. Everything else is theater.
P. S.: If you are not using AI for digital privacy reasons, that’s a story for another time.
Haroon Riaz is a documentary filmmaker, blogger, a communications consultant, and an advertising creative director. Natari (2021) is his debut feature as a director. Haroon is also the screenwriter of multiple award-winning feature documentary Indus Blues (2018).
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