AI Authenticity: Staying Human in a Machine-Made World

I don’t need to tell you that AI is everywhere and it’s becoming more popular with every week that passes. Every time you open social media (or a word document for that matter), there’s a GPT you can use or a new one being promoted, with new and amazing functionality that you ‘must’ have. Most people will now openly share how they are using it daily, from students to doctors to content creators and leaders.

The numbers are staggering. Across two popular AI platforms, OpenAI.com receives 1.2 billion monthly visits and ChatGPT.com receives over 5 billion visits. These figures are going to continue to rise.

This poses an interesting question: How do you use AI to your advantage and how do you use it while maintaining authenticity?

Read: How to Empower HR in the Digital Age: 7 Insights for 2025

I was listening recently to a lawyer in the music industry talk about copyright and the use of AI. The point the lawyer was making, was that there is no copyright available to musicians and creatives if they have used AI. WOW. That’s huge, right? Think about it, if you head over to a GPT and ask it to create you a piece of music, you put in some prompts, and it spits out a track. You might then add some of your music, some other suggestions and bam. You have an awesome track. You want to promote it and use it? That’s great, but there’s no copyright on it. Which means anyone else’s’ GPT can also come up with the same thing or similar and you’re left wide open. Because it wasn’t 100% human-made, you have no legal protection.

Authenticity in leadership is about leading with integrity from who you are. Authenticity is making sure you're not losing your voice to convenience. Yes, you can use the tools, but it's important to not lose yourself to them. You've got to stay present, intentional, and unmistakably human in everything you create and communicate.

Authentic leadership needs to be 100% human led, but the line is becoming increasingly blurred. People are finding it harder to discern what's real and what's not. This leads to an almost-automatic distrust when consuming information and content. Leaders need to be mindful of how these systems and tools are shaping their communication, their thinking and their leadership. If you do it wrong, you risk losing all trust and credibility.

So, how do you keep a human touch in your leadership in a world being shaped by machines?

Here are 3 steps to stay authentic in an AI-driven world:

Read: Culture Drift: When AI Moves Faster Than Trust

1. Use AI as a tool, not a clone

Most of us will use a calculator to help us with things from basic maths to complex calculations. We’ll use a spreadsheet to tabulate data and help inform decisions.

We use these tools to inform us, not make the decisions for us. That’s up to us.

Leaders can use AI to streamline repetitive tasks (like posting pre-created content), brainstorm ideas and speed up research. You could use it to transcribe meetings. Make sure you are being discerning with what information you use and how you use it.

2. Authenticity comes from ownership

When you use step 1 (using AI as a tool), how you then share this information, this content and these ideas is the key to remaining and being authentic.

Trust is something that every leader needs to cultivate – in your own business or in someone else’s’. If you use AI to cultivate and create your ideas and then you need to personalise it. You can do this by adding your own stories (AI can’t tell these stories for you) and sharing your unique viewpoint. This must be you.

Excellent and authentic leadership means showing up as yourself, and this starts with all the things you write and create. Trust isn’t built only with the words you use, it’s how you say them and why you say them.

3. Use it to challenge you

As humans, we naturally lean into our own perspective and can inadvertently create an echo chamber for ourselves. This isn’t always a good thing because it can lead us to becoming stuck in our views of the world, rather than creating a whole-picture view.

Use AI to challenge your thinking and your opinions/views. For instance, if you’re needing to write an article for your organisation based on your interpretation of an idea or an issue, why not write it and then put that into GPT asking it to provide counterarguments and an opposite position so you can potentially deepen your thinking about this issue or help you to solidify your position.

The situation is this: Nobody can do you like you. But also, AI isn’t going anywhere, and it is going to get better. You need to be able to use tools like AI as a tool to enhance your leadership does not replace it.

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