Is using AI in interviews cheating? An honest take.

I used an AI assistant during a real interview. I got the offer. And I've been arguing with myself about it ever since.

Not in a philosophical, detached way. In the way where you wake up at 2 AM and re-litigate the decision in the dark. In the way where you Google "is using AI in interviews cheating" and find nothing but people who are completely sure of themselves on both sides, and you think: none of you have actually done this.

I have. So let me tell you what it's actually like to sit with this question when it's not theoretical.

I build an AI interview assistant. I use it. I sell it. And I genuinely don't know if what I'm doing is ethical. This is my attempt to work through it honestly, without landing on a convenient answer.

01 The case for cheating

Let's start with the strongest version of the argument against what I do. Not the strawman. The real thing.

When you use an AI tool during an interview and the interviewer doesn't know about it, you are hiding something. Full stop. You have access to a resource the interviewer didn't consent to. They think they're evaluating you alone. They're not. That's deception, regardless of how small or large the assistance is.

The interviewer is making a hiring decision based on incomplete information. They believe the performance they're seeing is unassisted. If they knew you had a tool feeding you suggestions, they might evaluate you differently. By not telling them, you've removed their ability to make that choice.

There's also the collective harm argument. If AI-assisted candidates consistently outperform unassisted ones, companies will eventually make interviews harder, more adversarial, more surveillance-heavy. Proctored video. Eye-tracking. Keystroke analysis. The arms race makes the process worse for everyone, including the people who weren't using tools in the first place.

I take this argument seriously. I don't think people who hold this view are naive or old-fashioned. They're describing something real.

02 The case against

Now here's the other side, and it's not a rebuttal so much as a different framing of the same situation.

Technical interviews are broken. This isn't a controversial opinion anymore. It's close to consensus. They test performance under artificial pressure, not actual job competence. They penalize people who think slowly, who speak English as a second language, who have anxiety disorders, who are introverted, who process information by writing instead of talking.

If the measurement tool is flawed, is it cheating to compensate for its flaws?

Consider non-native English speakers. I'm one of them. When I interview, I'm not just solving a technical problem. I'm simultaneously translating my thoughts from Russian, searching for the right English term, managing my accent anxiety, and trying to appear confident. That's four parallel processes that a native speaker doesn't have to run. The AI tool doesn't make me smarter. It reduces the translation overhead so the interviewer can see what I actually know.

And here's the thing that people miss: an AI suggestion during a live interview is not the same as an AI writing your take-home project. In a live conversation, you still have to understand the suggestion, decide if it's right, integrate it into your answer naturally, and respond to follow-ups. If you don't actually know the material, the tool makes you worse, not better. You'll parrot something you don't understand, and any decent interviewer will catch it in the next question.

It's closer to open-book than ghostwriting. The tool amplifies signal. It doesn't create it.

03 What changed my mind

For a while, I was firmly in the "it's obviously fine" camp. Then I did something that complicated my position: I ran mock interviews from the other side of the table.

I asked friends to interview with me. Some used AI tools. Some didn't. I didn't know who was using what. My job was to evaluate them and then guess who was assisted.

I couldn't tell.

The good candidates who used AI tools sounded exactly like good candidates who didn't. They gave structured answers, asked clarifying questions, went deep on follow-ups. The tool was invisible not because it was hidden, but because it was genuinely just a crutch for people who already knew their stuff.

The bad candidates who used AI tools were obvious. Not because I could see the tool, but because their answers had that uncanny quality. Technically correct but weirdly generic. They couldn't riff on their own answers. They froze on follow-up questions the tool hadn't anticipated. The AI made their weakness more apparent, not less.

That experiment didn't settle the ethics for me. But it did change the question I was asking. I stopped asking "is this fair?" and started asking "what is the actual harm?"

04 The Grammarly analogy

When I bring this up, people often say the comparison is ridiculous. Grammarly fixes typos. An AI interview tool feeds you answers. Completely different scale.

But is it? Let's walk through the spectrum.

• Grammarly corrects your grammar in professional emails. Nobody calls this cheating.
• Google Translate helps you draft a message in a language you half-know. Gray area, but mostly accepted.
• GitHub Copilot writes code suggestions while you work. Used by millions. Accepted at most companies.
• ChatGPT helps you prepare interview answers the night before. Almost universally considered fine.
• An AI tool suggests talking points during a live interview. Suddenly, cheating?

The line is real, but it's not where most people think it is. The jump from "AI helped me prepare" to "AI helped me in the moment" feels enormous, but the practical difference is smaller than it seems. If I memorized an AI-generated answer last night and recite it today, that's fine. If I glance at the same answer during the call, that's cheating? The knowledge in my head is identical in both cases.

The discomfort is about the real-time nature, about the hidden assistance. And that discomfort is valid. I feel it too. But discomfort isn't the same as a clear ethical violation.

GitHub Copilot is an interesting case. Software engineers now routinely use AI to write production code. The code ships. It runs in production. Nobody asks whether the engineer "really" wrote it. But if you use a similar tool during a coding interview, where the stakes are lower and the code will never ship, suddenly it's unacceptable. The inconsistency is hard to ignore.

05 My personal rule

I've landed on a rule for myself. It's not a universal ethic. It's a personal boundary that lets me sleep at night, most nights.

I only use the tool for things I actually know.

If I understand a concept but can't find the English words fast enough, the tool helps. If I've implemented a pattern before but blank on the name under pressure, the tool helps. If I know the answer but my brain freezes because there's a camera on and someone is judging me, the tool helps.

If I don't know something, I say I don't know. The tool might suggest an answer. I ignore it. Because using it in that case would be the thing people are actually afraid of: presenting knowledge I don't have as my own.

Is this a clean line? No. It's blurry and self-reported and relies on my own honesty with myself. I know that. But every ethical line is like that. The person using Grammarly also has to decide whether they're "fixing grammar" or "having AI write their emails for them." The GitHub Copilot user has to decide whether they're using a suggestion they understand or blindly accepting code they can't explain.

The tool is neutral. The ethics live in how you use it.

06 The honest conclusion

I wanted to write this essay and arrive at a satisfying answer. I didn't.

Here's what I actually believe, as honestly as I can state it: the interview system is genuinely unfair to a lot of people, and AI tools can correct for some of that unfairness. But they can also be used to fake competence, and the interviewer's inability to consent to the tool's presence is a real ethical problem, not a technicality.

Both of those things are true at the same time. The people who say "it's just leveling the playing field" are oversimplifying. The people who say "it's cheating, end of story" are also oversimplifying. The truth is uncomfortable and ambiguous and doesn't fit in a tweet.

I use the tool. I built it. I think it helps good people show what they can do. I also think the question of whether it's cheating doesn't have a clean answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, probably an AI interview tool.

Yes, I'm aware of the irony.

The best I can do is be honest about the tension, use the tool in a way I can defend to myself, and keep thinking about it. If the ethics were simple, I wouldn't still be writing about them.

— P.