Using AI to write emails, memos, reports, blog posts or any other communications will undermine your leadership journey.
My big question about AI in recent years has been, if I read a poem that speaks to my and your human condition and moves me in some way, does my relationship to that poem change when I discover that it was written with AI?
It wasn’t a very good question.
The better question is, if I or you write a poem, even a lousy poem, without AI assistance, what do we gain as individuals and what do we gain in our shared humanity? Or the inverse, if we use AI, what do we lose?
You may not be writing poetry as part of your leadership journey (although, why not?), but you do write emails, memos, annual reports, strategic papers, board reports, blog posts, social media and a whole pile of other words with the intention of communicating something from you to others.
You might have felt or even given into the pressure to use AI to:
- get over staring at a blank page
- generate ideas
- improve your style and grammar
- change your tone
- free up time for the gazillion other things you want or need to do
But here’s the problem.
Leadership work is 95%* building trust-based relationships through communications – verbal, written, and body. If we farm out that work, even the smallest amount of it to AI, we are farming out our leadership.
To me, that is a huge make or break dividing line in the future of leadership. And by leadership, I mean an ethical leadership that works to make organizations, communities, families, and all other relationships better to be in with kindness, consideration, compassion, creativity, innovation, and abundance. That stuff can’t be farmed out – either we work on it or we don’t have it.
Every time AI is used in communications, a little piece of our brain says, “huh, guess I’m not needed for this, now what?”. If that little piece of the brain went on to do something different, something creative, something kind, something beautiful, or something useful, then perhaps we could justify freeing it up. But the truth is, we already have so much free brain space that we don’t use that that little piece of the brain just joins the rest of the under-used and under-enjoyed cells until its time for it to die off.
The alternative is to use our brain cells to struggle with the blank page, to revisit, refine, and generate ideas, to wrestle with the good-enough and best words, sentences, and structures, and to grow our awareness of tone. We might think that they are just words on a page, but they are a manifestation of working on and with our ethics, values, and priorities as we focus on the intention of our communications and the people who will be reading them.
As Gloria Mark, researcher and professor of human-computer interactions at University of California, Irvine and the author of the substack The Future of Attention and the book Attention Span, recently wrote, “AI doesn’t write from the heart—it has no heart. It lacks empathy, reflection, intentionality. It doesn’t understand its audience”. (see Why AI Writing Feels Off)
Leadership is about courage. The courage to put ourselves out there and to own our thinking, our dreams, our strengths, our shortcomings, our hopes, our fears, and our ability and desire to do better for ourselves and others.
Face the blank page. That’s what it’s there for.
Babs
You can find out more about me and my coaching and facilitation practice at courageousleaders.ca.
*Let’s roll with knowing that the 95% is not hard data, that it’s my opinion.
Extras
- The Hidden Costs of AI that Most Leaders Miss, According to Simon
- Gen AI uUe at Work Saps Our Motivation Even as it Boosts Productivity, New Research Shows
- Productive Struggle: What We Lose When AI Does the Thinking
- Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
- I am writing this with a pencil – it could be an author’s last line of defence against AI
- The Death of the Student Essay – and the Future of Cognition
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash