We Who Wrestle With AI

They sound like us.

Full sentences… polished pauses… even the occasional joke or quip (if you’ve spent time using ChatGPT voice or Google NotebookLM, you know).
These machines are no longer just clunky tools doing tasks.
They’ve become voices, mirrors (a word I have used a lot)… even echoes of our tone, rhythm and timbre (if you don’t believe me, watch Rick Beato’s clip on AI music).

Personally, I’ve had multiple instances that have made me smile.

Smile in the same way I would when a colleague would deliver something that was… just right.
Different enough that it surprised me.
Smart enough that I thought it was better than something I could have delivered.
Smile because it knew where I wanted to go next… and gave other directions I had not anticipated.

But they don’t feel like us.

That’s the line… the sliver… the uncanny gap between imitation and experience… the human experience.
Because if creativity can be mimicked… if conversations can be cloned… if hesitation itself can be modelled… what’s left that is truly human?

We comfort ourselves with the myth of originality.

That only we stumble into the unplanned.
That only we improvise the imperfect.
That only we create the breathtakingly new.

I think the tension that we are all wrestling with is that AI can make that story harder to tell. 

It produces things that look (and are) original (have you seen this: Last Call Before A.G.I – Found Footage From The Future).
That pass as new… that trick our eyes and ears into nodding along.
My wrestling with this technology is usually around confronting the uncomfortable…

That maybe creativity isn’t about the output at all… maybe it’s about the feeling.

And then… do I care if that feeling was prompted by someone any differently than it would if it was hand-crafted by them? (this is what I mean by Vibe Content).
We know that machines don’t feel.
They don’t ache… they don’t thrill… they don’t love… they don’t grieve… they don’t care.

So the real work isn’t about beating them at their game… it’s about remembering ours.

To value the shaky idea in a quiet room that may or may not go anywhere.
To go beyond what AI outputs and think (much more deeply) about using it to challenge our ideas, to unlock new ones or push opposing perspectives to make us reflect more.
To notice the pauses that carry more weight than the answer.
To prize connection over polish.

The danger isn’t that machines become too human… it’s that we outsource what being human feels like.

That’s also the wrestle… that’s also the work.
It’s in the everyday when I have to decide what makes an AI output better than something that I could have come up with.
It’s in the everyday when I have to decide how many more inputs/outputs I need to get something to where it needs to be.

Before we ask leaders to be AI-first, it might be better to dig deep into how AI is really affecting their daily work (and the type of leadership work that AI eats for breakfast – drafts strategy decks, parses data, role-plays management conversations…).

Most of the discourse is stuck on outputs… when the real question is about the person feeding the inputs, and how they’re thinking about what AI even is… and what they want to do with it…

That’s the wrestle… that’s the work…

(Adam Brotman and I explored this in depth on this week’s Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast. He’s the co-author of AI First – The Playbook For A Future-Proof Business And Brand).

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