The Illusion of AI Competence: Smitten with What’s Written

I recently listened to an episode of The Curiosity Shop podcast in which Brené Brown and Adam Grant introduced a phrase that perfectly captures a growing crisis in modern leadership: “Smitten with what’s written.”

They were discussing a dangerous trap people fall into with generative AI. For anyone who has historically struggled to write clearly, persuasively, or professionally, AI can feel like a miracle. Click a button, and you suddenly have a polished deliverable with perfect grammar, clean bullet points, and an executive summary.

The problem? Leaders are being seduced by form and ignoring the total lack of substance. They mistake a slick presentation for a meaningful contribution.

As leaders, we need to recognize this behaviour for what it is: a failure of discipline and a threat to organizational health.

Here are the reasons why these matters exist and how to spot them on your team.

1. Pretty Formatting Does Not Equal Substance

It is easy to look at a beautifully formatted briefing note or proposal and assume that real effort went into it. But a clean layout can easily hide hollow thinking.

In governance and leadership, a polished document that lacks rigorous analysis is worse than a messy draft—it is deceptive. It creates a false sense of security. Never let a report’s aesthetics blind you to a lack of depth.

2. Bypassing the “Thinking” Process

Quoting an Atlantic article by Eve Fairbanks, Brené noted that writing isn’t just a tool for communication; it is also a tool for thinking.

When you force yourself to sit down, draft a page, wrestle with ideas for days, and boil a complex issue down to a single, clear, actionable sentence, you are forcing mental clarity. That messy, frustrating process is where discernment happens.

When someone uses AI to fully “flesh out” an idea from scratch, they completely bypass that cognitive friction. The result? Their thoughts remain fuzzy, and they lose the ability to spot the gaping holes in their own logic.

3. The Burden of “Work Slop.”

When an employee gets smitten with what’s written, a predictable—and toxic—workflow unfolds. They copy and paste a massive AI output, drop it on a colleague’s desk or in your inbox, and think they’ve done a spectacular job.

Brown and Grant call this “AI Work Slop.” It masquerades as a complete work but lacks the substance needed to advance the mission.

This isn’t effective delegation; it’s a failure of accountability. The creator has simply shifted the cognitive heavy lifting to the receiver. Now, you have to spend your own “cognitive dollars” wading through pages of beautiful prose, only to realize there is nothing useful inside.

4. Are Your People Pilots or Passengers?

Adam Grant framed this beautifully by asking whether your people are AI Passengers or AI Pilots.

• Passengers use AI as a lazy shortcut to avoid thinking. They sit back, let the machine drive, and take credit for reaching the destination.
• Pilots use AI deliberately to expand their creativity or refine their language, but they remain firmly in the driver’s seat for strategy, substance, fact-checking, and critical thought.

The Leader’s Call to Action

To protect your organization from being buried in “work slop,” you must look beyond crisp sentences and ruthlessly assess the underlying ideas.

Sit down with your team to set the ground rules up front. Establish clear expectations for how AI should be used—as a research assistant or an editing partner, not as the creator.

Make it clear: the human is always accountable for the heavy cognitive lifting.

If they didn’t do the thinking, they haven’t done the work.

You can watch or listen to the full podcast here: