It was called “The Gift of Boredom”, and I think it was one of ‘my’ best pieces. This is how it happened: A couple of months ago, one of my directors told me that we had secured a standing spot in the Daily Maverick, and he wanted me to use the opportunity to showcase our division - Odin. I love talking, and more often than not, convince myself I have something interesting to say, so I agreed. What started as a fun side show soon became a burden. It turns out that allocating time and mental bandwidth to this opportunity against a tight schedule was harder than I thought.
So to make things ‘easier’, I did what any self respecting leader would - I delegated. Ironically probably the same thinking that my boss had in the first place. And in this case the innocent victim was my trusted creative lead - Chad. He had the admirable job of chasing me for the article and ensuring that we weren’t late.
A few weeks later, and despite several timely prompts, we were.
And poor Chad, the high achiever that he is, was struggling to remain cordial with me. On the final deadline day, as I was walking into a meeting he finally lost it. Standing in my way, he asked me to drop everything I was doing and get it done. He wasn’t entertaining my feeble response about how “you can’t plan creativity” either. This drastic measure had caught the attention of the office staff and I felt the surging pressure to re-establish my authority (and office ego), with this upstart. I think he noticed the change in my expression and before I did, pleaded “at least tell me what it's going to be about?”.
To my (limited) credit, I had actually figured out what I wanted to write about, and briefly narrated my thoughts to him. I promised to get the article to him by next morning, and that he would have to negotiate with the Daily Maverick that that was ok. Frustrated but option-less he slowly retreated and I went into my meeting.
Coming out of that meeting, about an hour later, Chad came running at me again. Before he could say anything I said “Enough Chad, no more discussion on this!”.
What he said next blew my mind... “Just have a look at the article and let me know what you think”. Chad had gone to Chat-GPT, opened ‘Agent Mode’, asked it to research me online, read all my blogs from before, understand my writing style and then write the article based on the concept I had outlined to him. For those that have not yet played with Agent Mode, it's basically letting the AI take all the decisions needed to complete the task, and then watching it go, step by iterative step.
He had literally watched it spin up a virtual machine, open multiple browsers, log onto various platforms, like LinkedIn. Then bring up all my previous articles and only then begin to write ‘my’ article for me.
As I read the article I had a very strange, almost out of body experience. The feeling is hard to describe. The article was incredibly familiar but completely new at the same time. It was like I was hearing the voice in my head read to ‘another’ voice in my head. I know that's a weird description, but it's the most accurate I can come up with.
I was not sure how to feel about it. I was really happy with it, but not sure if I should be. Should I be proud or worried? I was actually feeling both. It was my idea, my writing style, my story and yet it wasn’t.
I found myself sharing the link to a few of my close friends, as I normally would for feedback, but not telling them that I didn't write it. Then feeling guilty that I didn't. What's worse is that all of my friends responded saying how great my article was and how they had shared it with their network already.
I did eventually tell them the truth. Honestly that hasn’t helped with the deep confusion I still feel when I think about the article. Perhaps this public confession will.
Logically I understand how and what happened, I actually do talks and workshops on this. But this time it felt very personal. Whose creativity was it? And what can I claim thereof? How does that impact my own value? What does this mean for my value going forward?
For now I can’t figure out how to feel about it. All I know is that pretty soon we will all have to. DM