Some years ago, an idea of mine was stolen from me with great politeness. When I was preparing my doctoral project, I asked a psychologist who was an expert in the subject and whom I admired to supervise it. She liked it so much that she proposed that we write a book together. The proposal caught me by surprise, and I thought it was too soon, as I had just enrolled in the first year and needed study time to mature the project. I told her we could talk about it again in a year. She didn't wait: months later, I found out that she had published an article in a psychology journal, where she was developing my idea with a research assistant, with whom she has been working on it ever since. It took me a whole year to re-do my thesis topic, besides the disappointment. I've been thinking again talking to a friend who is an editor, who organized a series of talks where an author laid out the ideas that were to be the basis of his next essay. Well, history is cyclical: apparently, one of the attendees poured the ideas learned into an article without citing him, arguing that he could not do so because he had not yet written the book. As if the order of publication decided whose idea it is.We live immersed in the debate of whether writing with artificial intelligence is plagiarism, and it is necessary to have it. But while we watch the machine, who watches us and our impulses?An idea, legally, cannot be plagiarized: expressions, exact words are copied from it. But at least the machine, with its coldness, doesn't become your friend to steal from you. It doesn't propose to make a book with your idea to then appropriate it, nor does it write to apologize for what it is taking from you. Breaking epistemic trust

What breaks in these situations is not a deal, but the most basic pact of human relations (and of evolution itself): what psychologists Fonagy and Allison baptized as epistemic trust. I open myself and give you what I know; you open yourself, trust me and receive it. It is a moment of connection between two minds, and from these moments arise culture and learning. Betraying it by pretending to participate, smiling and admiring, is doubly dishonest because it deceives not only knowledge, but also the bond. An apology that again feigns this connection without restoring anything does not repair it, it breaks it for the second time.Sometimes, seeing how things are, it's hard not to fall into despair, but if we allow each disappointment to isolate us, we will stop learning from each other and we will have no culture or evolution. However, since we have already seen that the order of the factors does alter the product, from now on my ideas will always go, first, in black and white.

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