Over half of the ‘thought leadership’ articles you read on LinkedIn might be written by ChatGPT or other AI tools.
That’s bad. It’s making content dumb or generic and certainly less human. And if it’s clear to readers that the piece is fake, what was the point? Wasn’t the writer of the thought leadership piece looking to build credibility? Now they’re outed, or at least suspected, as a faker.
This came up with us a few weeks back. A client gave us a draft of a thought leadership piece they wanted published. Okay fine… Sometimes we interview clients and ghostwrite stuff, but if a client is dead set on putting out their own (high quality) stuff, who are we to stop them?
Then we took a look at the piece. It wasn’t so much a thought leadership piece as a glowing, hyperbolic executive’s biography written in third-person voice. It was grammatically correct, decent English.
But the generic language, lack of personal stories, non-specific takeaways and lots of superlative, self-promotional language were all dead-giveaways. It was peppered with phrases like “revolutionizing,” “staggering achievement,” and “visionary.” Yikes.
We looked at the bottom of the piece and there was ChatGPT’s ‘4o’ watermark at the bottom of the page. They hadn’t even thought to remove it. We couldn’t use it. Total waste of time…
Why can’t ChatGPT give your thought leadership an original take?
ChatGPT or some other AI platform doesn’t know what’s in your head. And the AI won’t easily be able to pick out the critical ‘lessons learned’ from your LinkedIn profile or some random meeting transcript.
If you want to be a thought leader, you need to have original thoughts and a unique point of view.
Tell us how, despite a learning disability, you were able to teach yourself how to code and then get paid for it when you were 15.
What was it like laying off all your staff — including your best friend — and then finding a way to build the company back up from the ground?
How did you turn a sleepy audience at a VC presentation into captivated investors begging you to take their money?
Mine your life experiences for ideas that you are uniquely positioned to share.
Make these ideas come alive with powerful, personal details and anecdotes. On top of that, is there proprietary data you can cite? Ask yourself what kind of value your audience will get from reading your piece.
ChatGPT has its place. It can help you brainstorm ideas.
But it doesn’t have your lived personal experiences and insights, so it’s no substitute for your unique voice.
How to do thought leadership, with no ChatGPT help. A case study from the writer of Founder Mode
Reddit, Airbnb, DoorDash and Dropbox all got their start at Y Combinator, backer of 5,000 startups
So when the accelerator’s co-founder, Paul Graham, speaks, people listen to what he has to say.
In September, Graham wrote a thought leadership piece called Founder Mode. In it, he declared there were two types of leaders — founders and managers.
Founders are involved in every part of the business. They’ll roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. Elon Musk sleeping on the factory floor? That’s a leader in ‘Founder Mode.’
Managers, on the other hand, delegate. Graham had less charitable words for this type of leader: “Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.”
This thought leadership article broke the Internet in the fall of 2024. But why?
Graham’s angle came from his life. He wasn’t trying to make a sale. He was talking as a guy with a front-row seat to the successes and failures of thousands of startups. He specifically described a pattern of what worked and what didn’t.
It helped the article’s success that Graham’s personal experience jived with reality at scale. Fortune analyzed its Top 500, and saw that companies run by founders made a median 1,129% return on investment versus the 57% made by companies led by non-founders.
That kind of lived experience doesn’t come from ChatGPT.
How not to do thought leadership. Vague notions and dubious data
Remember we were saying that good thought leadership deals in specifics? And that ChatGPT sucks at that, because it doesn’t know the particulars of your own company’s stories?
Well, you actually don’t need AI to get vague and boring. Some people do that well on their own.
Enter Lattice, an HR software platform making headlines for its $3-billion valuation and its high-profile clients, such as Reddit.
Lattice’s CEO, Sarah Franklin, wrote a piece published to Lattice’s blog, noting that AI needed to be employed responsibly — just like any human would be. Fair enough, as far as that goes….
Then she declared: “Today, Lattice is making AI history. We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained, and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access, and even a manager. Just as any person would be.”
The comments section exploded. Lattice became a punchline.
The company later updated the piece saying: “This innovation sparked a lot of conversation and questions that have no answers yet. We look forward to continuing to work with our customers on the responsible use of AI, but will not further pursue digital workers in the product.”
I’m not saying Franklin’s piece was written by ChatGPT, but it suffers from something we’re seeing in a lot of LLM copy. They are self-congratulatory and don’t provide worthwhile takeaways for the audience.
Ask yourself who your audience is and what kind of value they will get after reading your piece.
If you can see them applying lessons from your thought leadership in day-to-day reality, that’s a good start.
Need help crafting a thought leadership piece?
If this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. But you can get help. Our PR team can help you polish your ideas into a great thought leadership piece. Contact the Mind Meld PR agency today.