Article (Cheeky Half 40): AI is not just a tool. It’s a reflection of who we are.
Think of AI as a mirror. Whatever quality of thinking a person brings to it, it reflects back, amplified. That observation cuts across the two rails that most AI discourse currently runs on: the technology is either taking everything or accelerating everything, as if those are the only clear positions available.
One practical consequence of the mirror analogy is something that now has a name in everyday conversation on AI: ‘AI slop’. Content produced when people hand the tool a vague prompt and accept whatever comes back is often generic, recognisable, and genuinely revealing of the person’s ability to engage in a critical way (assuming that is their objective). Give AI a shortcut mentality and it delivers shortcuts, enthusiastically and without judgment. Give it genuine curiosity, rigour, and well-constructed prompting, and it can amplify all of that instead. The technology is constant across both scenarios; the variable is the people interacting with the tool.
The same dynamic has a long history outside AI. A skilled surgeon with the right instruments achieves extraordinary things, while the same instruments in less experienced hands produce something different, because the outcomes track the surgeon’s judgment and accumulated skill rather than the quality of the tools. The competence of the professional and the quality of the tools are distinct variables, and conflating them, as so much AI discourse currently does, tends to obscure rather than clarify what might actually be happening.
A significant portion of the anxiety around AI seems located in a specific gap: the space between how quickly the technology is developing and how actively people are developing themselves in parallel. The faster AI moves and the more static people’s own capabilities remain, the larger that gap becomes and the more threatening the technology appears. The corollary is equally direct: the more depth, curiosity, creativity, and judgment a person develops, the more capable they become as an operator of any tool, including this one. That framing makes the AI question, at its core, a question about whether people stay curious, keep learning, and continue building the depth of judgment that determines how useful any tool becomes.
One further point deserves attention. Large-scale job cuts have occurred in corporate life annually for as long as the cycle has existed, attributed in turn to the economy, to restructuring, to changing market conditions, and now to AI. Scepticism about this latest attribution is warranted, since the label may reflect the convenience of a neat explanation as much as the reality of the decisions driving it.
Listen to Cheeky Half 40 of Leadership Decanted.
(Episode 6.02 with Dr. Jay Spence (‘Is AI coming for our brains?!?!’) makes a good companion listen for anyone who wants to follow this thread further.)