I had an experience the other day that led me down a little bit of a rabbithole.... basically let me ask.... Have you ever got a response to a thoughtful email and think: "Wait, did <insert name here> even read this message and think about it, or did they just run it through ChatGPT and hit copy-paste?"
Turns out there is a name for that feeling. It’s called **Epistemic Laundering**. In finance, money laundering is about hiding the shady origin of cash to make it look "clean". In AI, epistemic laundering is about taking a thought, a critique, or a question, and passing it through an LLM to "clean" it of any actual human effort.
This is what i experienced. So why did it feels so "off": Well, for the following reasons...
* Zero Skin in the Game : When someone copy-pastes AI feedback, they aren't actually standing behind the words. They’re abdicating their judgment to a statistical pattern-matcher.
* The Validation Loop : AI is programmed to be helpful and polite. If I feed my own half-baked idea into an AI and ask you for "feedback," and you just copy-paste that AI's polite summary back to me, we haven't actually moved the needle, you have just laundered my own bias through your chatbot.
* Skill Atrophy : If we stop "applying our minds" to the small stuff (emails, peer reviews, quick notes whatever..), we lose the ability to do the deep thinking when it actually matters. This scares me.
Sadly i think this is going to get worse. My view is that AI is a brilliant sparring partner, but a terrible proxy for presence.
If you’re too busy to reply, a short "Got it, will look later" is infinitely more valuable than a 3-paragraph AI hallucination that proves you didn't actually read the work. This is my point.
Let’s keep the "human" in human resources (and networking). Anyone have a similar experience ?
#AI #FutureOfWork #CriticalThinking #EpistemicIntegrity #Leadership