There’s something slightly strange happening in our relationship with AI.
If someone uses it to solve a complicated problem, we applaud them. If AI analyses thousands of data points in seconds, we marvel at it. If a mundane process that used to take three hours suddenly takes ten minutes, we celebrate with a long lunch 😉.
But if someone writes something and we suspect AI has been involved? Suddenly we’re detectives.
We spot the phrasing, the formatting, the suspiciously polished sentence structure and our inner narrator and accompanying eye roll says "Well that's obviously written by AI.”
Even LinkedIn has joined the AI-policing brigade, with the option to label posts as “AI slop”.
We understand the frustration. There is plenty of AI slop around. Content generated without thought, perspective or even basic fact checking. Encouraging people to think critically about what they produce is definitely important, but it looks like we're beginning to confuse standards with judgement? And what will be the long term impact of this?
Innovation requires people to try things they haven’t mastered yet. It requires experimentation, imperfect first attempts and the occasional spectacular failure.
When attempts are mocked, at best it results in thicker skin and at worst in people refusing to take those interpersonal risks again.
So, rather than chastising people about experimenting with AI, perhaps we should be asking them curious questions?
What was your thought process? What improvements could you make? What could make this report more 'you'? If I asked you tomorrow, could you remember what you wrote?
Likewise, we could be pointing them towards good usage examples, better prompts and ways to integrate their own thinking more.
It is a legitimate concern that people are outsourcing their thinking to AI, but mockery isn’t going to make them think more deeply.
The challenge for leaders isn’t to make AI use socially unacceptable. It’s to make unthinking AI use professionally unacceptable, while creating enough safety for people to learn how to use it better.
Furthermore, if we become a workforce of AI detectives, constantly looking for evidence that someone has used the tool, one of two things is likely to happen.
People will push their use underground, creating all sorts of potential governance and compliance issues.
They’ll become more reluctant to experiment at all, slowing down the very innovation organisations keep saying they want.
If we want less AI slop and more AI progress, we need high standards without the shame, which means being clear about what good AI use looks like, while giving people room to learn, experiment and improve.