Nobody does it better
Philippe Beaudoin · March 29, 2026
Yesterday I was at a friend’s place, he had asked each of us to bring a piece of “hidden art” and to complement it with a small explanatory text. Many of these short essays were very moving.
My friend had written one. She placed it besides a pair of watercolours. One was hers, the other was an AI version of the same scene. The title of the diptych was “Who Did it Better?”
I was strangely triggered by that title. A part of me was slowly rebelling against that word, “better”.
Then I read the essay. It was precisely about that. About “Who Did it Better?” being a naive question. Instead of providing an answer, my friend did something more powerful. She pointed at a question we ask every day, “Is X better than Y?”, and allowed us to feel the futility of it.
She saw me reading her essay:
— “What do you think?”, she asked — “…” — “Gemini wrote it”, she said.
My jaw dropped.
She smiled. Her partner stepped in and told me he, too, had used Gemini to write his essay. An essay about the vulnerability of putting something intimate on a wall for everyone to see. For everyone to judge.
— “You didn’t write that yourself? But… It was so touching! I just wanted to hug you while reading it!” — “No, Gemini wrote it. But it says what I wanted to say.”
Yes. I felt the words of my friend in his essay. I felt him behind his words. His doubts, his vulnerability. And now hearing him affirm that “Gemini wrote it” felt wrong. Whatever Gemini wrote clearly existed in him to begin with.
Imagine for an instant that we considered our brain as separate from “us”. Then we could write something like “I did not write it, my brain did.”
Or, to push the nonsense further, imagine we found a way to connect our kidneys to a text-generation device, we could ask: “Who did it better? Me or Kidneys?”
There are moments where the question “Who did it better, X or Y?” is nonsensical. When an artifact is so clearly the result of a deep collaborative process that the boundaries between X and Y blurs. I don’t care if my friend used his right brain or his left brain to write his essay. I don’t care if he engaged his prefrontal cortex at 40% and his thalamus at 15%. I don’t care if he asked a spell checker to correct his words. I don’t care if his mom proofread the essay…
I don’t care if Gemini wrote the final words.
If it feels like him to me, if it feels like him to him them… It’s him.
Nobody did it better. He did it and the world helped.