I published my first book in 1988. I was first published in a national newspaper in 1984. Over the years, I have probably written two million published words, but who’s counting? Most of those words are now online.
As with most writers on business and leadership, these articles have helped me refine my insights and establish myself as a resource for those trying to improve their management and leadership skills.
These insights are the result of interviewing thousands of leaders, managers, owners and officials, along with attending and speaking at hundreds of conferences and training sessions. Being a business owner myself, I’ve lived through the challenges of managing people, building sales, setting vision, managing the advent of digital technology, not to mention economic downturns and Covid. It’s been a good run so far and I really believe I have helped lots of people.
Yet I, and millions of other business writers and experts, now find ourselves competing with others who are leveraging artificial intelligence to accelerate the process of research and content creation without doing the primary work it takes to produce original material. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a rant about Chat GPT, Claude, Deep Seek and the other variations on the theme.
Artificial intelligence is a tool. Like any technology, it can be used . . . and abused. I use it myself and so do you. We can’t help but do this, since it has been integrated into every browser, not to mention scads of other business and consumer applications. I used to spend hours coming up with just the right title and chapter headings. Now I can ask AI to give me 10, 20, 30, or 50 suggestions and it produces them within ten seconds.
But therein lies the rub. I don’t know if those title suggestions are being lifted from someone else’s work (or even mine if I have forgotten that I published that title years before). Taken to the next level, I can ask these platforms to produce a 50,000 word manuscript on a topic on which I focus and skip the effort in between. But as with the title suggestions, I don’t know where this information has come from. For all I know, the exact words used in this AI manuscript may have been lifted from a selection of colleagues’ books or articles. Of course, my sense of ethics prevents me from doing this. But how about everyone else?
Truth is, someone who desires to establish themselves in a particular niche could, within a week, “publish” a selection of books on the topic in question by using artificial intelligence to produce the text, illustrations, layout, cover design and even a set of fake testimonials. All of this information will be culled from others’ work.
Those hiring speakers, consultants and others to advise them are now faced with having to do extra due diligence to ensure the person they select is the real deal. I’d like to think that those doing the selecting are performing this due diligence, but I know many are not.
Going forward, we will see endless examples of this kind of manipulation in every part of the economy. After all, we’ve already seen judges censure attorneys for submitting “expert testimony” to the court that was actually produced by AI the night before. What’s next? Perhaps developers will ask AI to produce building blueprints, so they don’t have to pay architects and engineers for design work. On the other hand, the bottom has dropped out of the market for those who get paid to write term papers for college students. At least this is something to celebrate.
So, I said I wouldn’t rant. But now what for me? Adapt and move on. As I said before, artificial intelligence is just tool. Nothing more. I will continue to leverage it, content in the knowledge that even though I have lost control of my intellectual property, it is still being used to help others.