AI programs such as ChatGPT and Gemini are heaven-sent for people who don’t want to think. For them, AI is a way to avoid work and this is a major issue for businesses and recruiters.
AI programs are trained on past data only and the quality of that data may be loaded with biases. They cannot generate new and original ideas. Their output is a fancy form of pattern recognition.
AI doesn’t create—it recombines. It’s convergent, not divergent. It looks backward, pulling from what we already know. It’s the opposite of original and authentic. It’s derivative.
It can produce documents through “deep learning” or generative adversarial networks, which look professional but still relies on patterns found in their training data.
If you work in an office and receive a document written entirely by AI, you can tell immediately. It’s emotionless, flat and uninspiring. Managers and the media call it AI slop.
Slop is formulaic, verbose and without substance. It is the lowest common denominator in professional writing and communication. It insults the reader.
Research at Duke University found that people who use AI at work were negatively perceived by their colleagues as less diligent, lazier and less competent than those who used their brains. They’re the dunces and in a competitive workplace, must be shown the door.
Employers pay their staff to use their brains and skills and by forgoing that, they’re worthless to the organisation. By using AI to produce text or images, they’re producing spam in office hours.
Creativity and innovative thinking at work comes from a person tapping into their emotional and personal history. Sometimes it can be generated by brain-storming in teams.
When a musician writes a song, or an artist paints a landscape, they draw on memories, dreams, and cultural stories.
Ditto when someone in an office comes up with a novel solution to a problem. For example, they write a research report which has novel ways to resolve a complex organisational problem.
AI can learn how something “should” look but it does not feel anything. It doesn’t have dreams, joys, sorrows, or lived experiences to draw upon.
That is a major and telling difference, especially when communicating with other people. AI doesn’t have empathy or positive regard. It has no memory.
Humans are full of contradictions. We change our minds, get struck by random ideas, and sometimes discover breakthroughs by mistake or frustration.
AI runs on logical patterns. When they surprise us, it’s usually because the data or algorithmic process led to an outcome we didn’t expect such as through bias or a hallucination. But that’s not the same as a human wanting to do something new or break a rule just because it feels right.
Humans experience love, loss, culture, and wonder. We pour these things into our work. Machines do not have private memories or family traditions that guide their output. They just process what we feed them.
Human creativity, powered by real emotions and personal narratives, is here to stay.