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Food pills, which serve a complete meal in capsules, have long been a science fiction staple. Currently, Thought For Thought mass producers have the equivalent: there are countless small thought leadership Gobbes tailored to your interests and directed to your inbox everywhere.
Thinking leadership was already “Swill’s Great River” in 2017. Ah, those smart, innocent days! With the help of AI generated, it is now roaring, malodras, torrents.
Roi, a new book by Cindy Anderson and Anthony Marshall, defines the genre as “a unique, evidence-based intelligence that gives leaders the insights they need to make better business decisions.” It includes consultant whitepapers, online interactive explanators and polls on local issues, and anti-minative social media posts on the platform from Substack to LinkedIn.
But generative AI helps people solve more and more averagely composed, vaguely plausible posts, messages, powerpoints and infographics.
Searching for “AI LinkedIn Post Generator” gives you multiple tools that can drive fake thought leadership out of nothing. “Say goodbye to the hassle of creating LinkedIn content.” “Content that positions you as an industry expert (created)” says another. (LinkedIn says, “The most impactful post… It comes from real human insights, not automation.”)
It cannot be said that there has been no warning. In early 2023, shortly after ChatGpt was released on Wild, tech entrepreneur Phil Libin observed that “the cost of producing highly persuasive lies has dropped to zero.”
Most people who called themselves were alkies by promoting untruths that thought leaders had ald. However, thought leadership generates a return on investment. Anderson and Marshall calculate an average of 156% as “16 times more effective than traditional marketing approaches.” It is not necessary to accept accurate calculations to know that the return will increase as the cost of generating such insights decreases.
It’s no surprise that Anderson, who works as a producer at IBM Institute for Business Value, rides AI-generated posts as “fake thought leadership.” Large language models “can’t create new ideas and can’t create data,” she told me. “We’re constantly doing tests and writing about what we normally do with AI, but I’m still fast.”
She and Marshall say that ideological leaders should be trustworthy authors and should provide compelling insights and usable recommendations based on reliable research. Even if it’s marketing in nature, they say that thinking leadership must be free of “outstanding commercial messages.” The audience for this content should also be considered discerning. The Anderson and Marshall study suggests that senior leaders consume this type of content from only five sources, from an average of five, nearly three hours a week to increase this type of content by 50% over the past 18 months.
However, it is difficult for many influencers to go beyond these guidelines, especially with the help of an ever-present generation AI assistant, to resist temptation.
I was recently told that AI is already threatening the lower layers of Ghostwriters. Because influence-hungry business leaders can encourage them to create a short book with their names on the cover. If it takes a weekend for bots to fill up their hardbacks, imagine how quickly AI can help them derive their reputation as a viral thinker on social media.
According to Sound Leadership’s ROI, more meticulous authors should consider using AI to tune and amplify content. Once governance and ethical guardrails are applied and their trustworthy original insights are ready, AI “helps create dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of personal perspectives,” says Anderson, by turning the same broad idea into bespoke nuggets aimed at individual recipients.
At the other end of the production line, I apply my own AI tools to the unstoppable extrusion of this idea, slice them and draw them into a relaxed, snackable summary.
There are probably clues in science fiction as to how to prevent a vicious cycle, as you have to give something. Rather than a pill-sized diet, this century’s mysterious medicine limits hunger for unnecessary calories. Why is Ozempic that keeps our appetites down and produces and consumes AI junk food? It’s worth thinking about.
