You read a perfectly polished LinkedIn post, assume “AI wrote that,” and suddenly you trust the writer a little less. That tiny drop in trust is what many leaders secretly fear every time they open a prompt window instead of a blank page.
“Slop” has become shorthand for AI‑generated content that looks like good work but doesn’t actually move anything forward.
In a landscape flooded with this kind of output, anything too smooth or generic triggers suspicion, so leaders worry that using AI will make them look lazy, fake, or less competent, even when the underlying thinking is strong.
Most resistance to AI in leadership is about loss of identity. Leaders who’ve built their careers on expertise, judgment, and original thinking quietly wonder, “If a model can do this in seconds, what does that say about how I earned my seat?”
AI is now in almost everything, so we must decide: do we reject it or use its power while keeping our humanity?
I believe that authenticity does not come from whether you used AI; it comes from whether your values, decisions, and behaviour line up over time. Let’s treat AI as a draft partner and thinking aid, while keeping the human parts non‑delegable: sense‑making, ethical judgment, relationships, and the hard calls that only you can make.
Feeling an urge to push AI away is a very human response to protecting your identity, not proof that you are “behind.”
Engaging with an executive coach who is AI-fluent can also help redefine your value in an AI‑augmented world, and craft a personal AI philosophy that feels both deeply human and genuinely future‑proof.