The company wants authenticity. The authenticity has been optimized.

LINKEDIN HAS BECOME A VERY STRANGE PLACE TO EXPERIENCE HUMANITY.

A CEO has learned something from his daughter.

A founder had a conversation with a barista that changed how she thinks about leadership.

Someone missed a flight and discovered resilience.

Someone's dog died and apparently this taught them seven principles about organizational transformation.

There was coffee.

There was reflection.

There was gratitude.

There was a lesson.

There was always a lesson.

Once upon a time corporate writing was accused of sounding robotic.

This was considered an insult.

Now corporations have actual robots available and, remarkably, the writing has become even more corporate.

The Authentic Self, As Approved by Legal

The old executive post was already strange.

You knew, somewhere deep down, that the CEO of a multinational corporation probably did not wake up at 5:12 AM desperate to tell LinkedIn:

Three things I learned this week about vulnerability.

Maybe they did.

People contain multitudes.

But corporate communication had a recognizable smell.

Someone wrote something.

Someone else softened it.

Legal removed the dangerous sentence.

PR removed the interesting sentence.

Comms added the word “journey.”

Eventually a perfectly safe block of language emerged that technically contained a human name.

AI did not invent this.

It inherited it.

And then it removed the last bits of friction.

Corporate AI slop is what happens when language designed to sound human gets produced without requiring a human thought to happen first.

That is a slightly different problem from bad writing.

Bad writing can be charming.

Corporate slop is smooth.

Smooth is worse.

I Had a Conversation This Week

The Australian Financial Review recently took aim at executives filling LinkedIn with AI-assisted “authenticity,” and the responses were wonderfully revealing.

One executive commenting on the piece admitted to recognizing the familiar setup:

I had a conversation this week that made me reflect...

Did it?

Or were you early to a meeting?

Another observed that a coffee can no longer simply be coffee. It must become a powerful reminder that in a world of noise, clarity wins.

This is the genre.

Normal life enters.

Leadership content comes out.

Child asks a question.

LEADERSHIP.

Flight delayed.

RESILIENCE.

Sandwich arrives late.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CUSTOMER OBSESSION.

The CEO sees a bird.

By Thursday the bird is a five-part framework.

The Machine Learned Corporate From Us

It would be satisfying to blame AI for this voice.

We cannot.

AI did not crawl out of a server rack knowing the phrase:

In today's rapidly evolving landscape...

It learned from us.

Corporate websites.

Annual reports.

Consulting decks.

Leadership blogs.

Press releases.

LinkedIn.

Millions upon millions of sentences whose primary function was to occupy the precise emotional territory between important and nothing.

We fed all of that into language models and then acted shocked when they returned:

At the end of the day, it's about people.

Of course it is.

It was always about people.

Thank God somebody finally said it.

AI slop is often just corporate language with the human bottleneck removed.

This is why executives using AI can begin sounding weirdly identical even when they work in completely different industries.

Different companies.

Different biographies.

Different countries.

Same cadence.

Same insight.

Same three bullet points.

Same slightly overcooked sincerity.

The machine is not exposing its own personality.

It is averaging ours.

Leadership Is Supposed to Contain Judgment

This is where the problem stops being funny.

Executive communication matters precisely because people assume it contains judgment.

Not literary brilliance.

Judgment.

Why did the company make this decision?

What does the leader believe?

What are they worried about?

What are they willing to say that everyone else may not agree with?

What did they learn because they were actually there?

Those things are valuable because they are scarce.

LinkedIn's Australian managing director has reportedly said CEO posts average substantially higher impressions and engagement than ordinary posts, which makes sense: people pay attention because leadership speech is supposed to be a signal.

Then the leader outsources the signal.

Now what are we following?

A writing style?

A content calendar?

A well-configured prompt?

The CEO may still approve the post.

But approval is not authorship.

Everyone Is a Thought Leader, Nobody Has a Thought

There is an astonishing amount of thought leadership produced by people who seem determined not to reveal a thought.

Real thoughts are dangerous.

They can be specific.

Specificity creates disagreement.

Disagreement creates risk.

Corporate communication tends to sand these edges down.

AI is exceptionally good at sanding.

Ask for a provocative post and it will generate something provocative within acceptable enterprise parameters.

We need to rethink everything we know about leadership.

Okay.

What specifically?

It starts with listening.

Jesus Christ.

The breakthrough has arrived.

This is the central contradiction of AI thought leadership.

The output can be provocative in shape while being almost completely conventional in substance.

Short sentence.

Shorter sentence.

One-word paragraph.

Listen.

Then a list.

Then:

Agree?

We are all trapped at a conference.

The Junk Food Problem

Behavioral scientist Amantha Imber, quoted in discussion around the AFR article, compared workplace AI slop to junk food: polished on the outside, little nutritional value inside.

That metaphor works because corporate slop is not usually offensive enough to reject immediately.

It is palatable.

You consume it.

Nothing happens.

Ten minutes later you cannot remember a sentence.

This is the perfect content for a corporate feed because nobody can really object.

And nobody can really care.

Maybe this is what companies misunderstand about authenticity.

Authenticity is not a tone.

There is no authenticity slider.

You cannot prompt:

Make this 20% more vulnerable and 15% more visionary.

Authenticity is partly the risk that something sounds like you because somebody else would not have said it.

AI can help sharpen that.

It cannot supply the reason you believe it.

The More Words Become Free, the More Expensive a Voice Gets

This may be the optimistic part.

AI makes competent corporate writing nearly free.

Which means competent corporate writing becomes nearly worthless.

That is not the same thing as saying writing becomes worthless.

Quite the opposite.

Several people responding to the AFR discussion argued that strong human writing may become more valuable precisely because synthetic corporate prose is everywhere.

That feels right.

When everyone can generate a polished paragraph, polish stops differentiating.

What remains?

Specificity.

Taste.

Experience.

Humor.

Risk.

A weird opinion.

A sentence somebody might actually say.

The scars.

The details.

The parts the machine would normally smooth away.

Leave Something Ugly In

Maybe the new rule for executive communication should be simple:

If the AI made it better, make sure it did not make it nobody's.

Keep the sentence you use in real life.

Keep the odd example.

Keep the part where the story does not resolve into a leadership lesson.

Not every coffee needs to become a framework.

Sometimes you had coffee.

The more companies automate language, the more suspicious perfectly optimized language will become.

The executive who sounds slightly awkward may eventually sound more trustworthy than the executive who sounds magnificent.

Because awkwardness has provenance.

Somebody was there.

Somebody meant it.

Somebody wrote the damn thing.