When the Words Sound Smarter Than the Idea
How AI makes weak ideas feel credible and why leaders lose their judgment when they stop thinking for themselves.
Someone somewhere is feeding ChatGPT a terrible idea and instantly receiving a paragraph that convinces them they are brilliant, masterful, and full of good ideas.
It is an almost perfect snapshot of a very old pattern. We have always been drawn to articulate language, especially when it gives our assumptions a sense of polish. Now someone is sitting there nodding along to a slick explanation simply because it sounds right. If it sounds good, what more could we want, right?
In the 90s a certain kind of confident persuasive tone was selling dads in the nineties the Potty Putter so they could putt while they used the bathroom. To women, the ThighMaster promised transformation in minutes a day. The ideas were flimsy, and honestly quite dumb, when examined carefully, yet the language around them felt smart and authoritative to their audience.
Today the same dynamic covers Instagram. Clean visuals. Tight scripts. Confident delivery with just the right lighting. It is astonishing how quickly an idea feels credible when the sentences are smooth and the aesthetic is orderly.
Now AI can make leaders feel that with every idea they have.
This is one of the reasons why AI can be so deceptive. Not because it thinks. It does not. Not because it evaluates. It cannot. There is no judgment inside it, no sense of truth or falsehood, no belief to protect, and no real life context. It is a system trained to generate the next coherent sentence, and coherence feels like intelligence even when the content is weak.
Give it a fuzzy premise and it will return something that reads finished. Give it a half-formed thought and it will package it as if you have reached a conclusion. It will not ask whether the idea makes sense for your context. It will not suggest you reconsider the premise. It will simply articulate whatever you gave it, only with more confidence than the idea has earned.
And we should also acknowledge the opposite problem. Sometimes the idea is good, but the person holding it cannot express it well enough for others to see its value. Some thoughts collapse simply because they are trapped behind clumsy phrasing or an unclear frame. In those moments, AI can level the playing field a bit, giving people the articulation they never had access to. But even then, the tool is shaping the language, not deciding the worth of the idea itself.
And this is where the real danger sets in, because the tool treats weak and strong ideas exactly the same.
Input in a week idea? Receive three paragraphs of fully articulated reasons why the idea is strong. Read closer and you’ll often notice a circular fluff with no real context. Sure, its getting better and we’ll continue to see improvements, but its not you, its not thinking, and it doesn’t have your lived expereince, morals, judgment, and thinking.
I recently came across a 7-Up advertisement featured in LIFE magazine in September of 1955 here on Substack showing a baby drinking straight from a glass bottle, the copy proudly claiming the company had the youngest customers in the business. Nothing about it looked reckless in its own time. The language sounded modern and informed, and parents trusted it. We laugh now, but they did not. They trusted the presentation.
Clean, compelling articulation creates credibility long before truth does.
Leaders in particular should pay attention. Many have long benefited from speechwriters, ghostwriters, and assistants who make rough ideas sound refined. AI simply expands that support to anyone who wants it, and it creates a the illusion of clarity that appears when words and sentence line up neatly on a page, the symmetry of threes, the perfect looking list…the “thinking” has already been done. The sentences look complete. The reasoning often is not.
When I visit my grandpa’s farm, I still see machines and buildings that are only a shell of what they once were. Wind, rain, snow, and time have stripped the paint, rotted the boards, and left some barns standing on a shaky foundation, too unsafe to use.
The same thing happens to leaders who outsource their thinking and judgment. Over time they have eroded and become a frame without real strength, present in title but unable to carry the weight of real decisions.
When your team asks, “What now?” and every answer you’ve ever given was formed in the soft glow of a laptop while you hunted for advice, you feel the floor shift. You hesitate. You try to steady yourself with charisma, but the room can read you. They always can. Credibility doesn’t disappear all at once. It wears down in small moments like this.
Leaders have to keep pressing into the difficulty of not knowing, the stretch of refining an idea that does not yet make sense. That slow work of testing and retesting your own thoughts is how clarity of judgment stays strong.
And because the paragraphs appear polished, it becomes easy to assume the idea is too.
A leader who stops thinking stops leading.
AI accelerates this problem because it removes the difficulty that protects clarity. You no longer sit there with that familiar sinking feeling when a thought collapses on the page, or stare at a half-formed idea that almost works but refuses to land. That stretch matters more than we admit. There is beauty in that discomfort… even when you want to escape it.
Some call this the messy middle in creative work. The moment when an idea that once felt crisp starts to blur at the edges, when you question every sentence, when momentum comes to a screeching halt and you’re not sure whether to keep going or throw the whole thing out.
But its actually through this process you refine, rethink, and reexamine your ideas and come out with something stronger.
But with AI? You can move straight to polished language without ever examining the premise. The tool chooses one word after another, stacking words and sentences neatly together, each one flowing cleanly into the text.
A finished-sounding paragraph is not the same as a finished thought.
Leadership still begins before anything is written. It begins in the work of asking whether an idea is true, whether it is good, and whether it accounts for the people who will live with its consequences.
No model can do this for you. No assistant can absorb that responsibility. The labor of judgment remains human.
You can use AI. I do. It can help you see the idea more clearly than you could on your own. It can refine the words long before you’ve refined the thought.
But it cannot tell you what should exist in the world. That responsibility is still yours, whether you claim it or not.
If you lose that, the tool is not the problem, you are.