Beyond Execution

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence is commonly framed as a challenge to employment, authorship, academic integrity, professional competence and human intellectual distinctiveness. This paper argues that these apparently separate disputes share a deeper institutional problem. For much of modern educational and professional life, personal execution of an intellectual task provided a useful, though imperfect, signal of the capability underlying it. Generative AI weakens that inference because increasingly sophisticated cognitive execution can now be obtained externally. This paper describes institutional reliance on production as evidence of capability as execution-proxy dependence and develops a related empirical hypothesis, execution-command dissociation: as externally available AI performs more cognitive execution, the predictive relationship between the quality of an intellectual artefact and the producer's demonstrated command of that artefact may weaken. The paper develops substantive intellectual command as a more direct object of evaluation, distinguishes capability amplification from competence amplification, and examines implications for assessment, authorship, disclosure, professional competence and human agency. Its central proposition is that AI is weakening the informational value of execution as evidence of human capability. The resulting empirical claim is deliberately falsifiable: if artefact quality remains equally informative about independently demonstrated intellectual command under AI-assisted and unaided production, the theory must be revised.