Ep 142 AI: The hidden cost of plausible, almost-right work

AI and cheap tools have given everyone the ability to produce work that looks professional, sounds credible, and feels like the real thing. The problem? It isn't. In this episode, Stephen introduces the term Plausible Noise — the growing layer of almost-right work that's quietly eroding quality standards, collapsing accountability, and making it harder than ever to defend the value of real expertise. He breaks down how it's breaking organizations, why experts are partly to blame, and what you can actually do about it.

SHOW NOTES AND MORE:
https://thecrazy1.com/

WATCH MORE CONTENT ON YOUTUBE:
https://www.youtube.com/@StephenGates

WORK WITH CRZY:
http://crzydesign.com/

FOLLOW THE CRAZY ONE:
LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook 

Transcript

Cold Open: Sounding Smart vs. Being Smart

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I feel like I can't be alone that in this new age of AI kind of infiltrating almost every part of what we do, that it just kind of feels like everybody feels like they can do everybody else's job. And look, the output from it, in a lot of cases, it doesn't look horrible. And I think honestly, that's probably the problem because it looks real, it sounds real, right? Like it passes the meeting. But the problem is, I think for too many of us, and I think it's gonna be one of the biggest challenges for leaders and organizations going forward, is that sounding smart and being smart aren't the same thing, right? Sounding smart is a confidence. And I think for a lot of us, it's it's sort of breaking our teams and our brains and everything from the inside out, and we're not talking about it. And so I think I originally sort of deal with this phrase of like plausible noise. Implausible noise has dragged me back out of the semi-retirement I was in to be able to get this show going again. So welcome back to episode 142 of the Crazy One Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Steven Gates. This is a show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and all the things that matter to creative people. But look, I let's get it out of the way first, right? It's not the first time I've said it. Probably won't be the last time I say it. I'd love to do the show more. I would. I'd love to be able to do it more. But the reality is, for me, over the last year or two, I am just in a heads-down sprint survival to keep my own thing going, right? It's a seven days a week keeping work going out the door, keeping new work coming in the door. And at the end of the day, there isn't the energy or free space to do this show as much as I'd love to. I'd love to do the show. I'd love to keep it going. Just the reality has been something different. But look, I think this problem, like I said, has dragged me out of my semi-retirement to come back to do a new series of shows about AI and its impact on just business in general, creativity, all of it. Because the interesting thing is, I think a lot of the concepts that we talked about on the show over the years are still relevant. And they're still the problems that are driving a lot of the problems that I'm seeing. But lately I keep hearing the same story. I hear it from clients, I hear it from leaders, it's the marketing director that redesigned the deck, it's the CEO that's rewriting copy, it's the PM that mocked up a new UI. And it's all done with confidence, right? Through AI, whether it's a prompt or Tandra or a template or clawed code or whatever it is. And look, in a lot of cases, when you look at it, the output's not horrible. It's not embarrassing. There's nothing kind of obviously wrong with it. It is, to use the word I used before, plausible. But I think the thing is, and the thing that we need to start recognizing and reacting to is that plausible and great aren't the same thing. Plausible and strategic are not the same thing. And if nobody can tell the difference, if leadership doesn't know what good looks like, if you don't value thinking and strategy, and at the end of the day, as we've talked about so many times here before on the show, you value output over outcome, then plausible wins. And I think my thing is that I haven't seen anybody put a name on this yet. So today, that's what I want to do. So let's just talk about it, right? Like for me, plausible noise is when kind of accessible tools, Claude, ChatGPT, Canva, new ones come out every 30 seconds. But when those tools let people produce something that looks like expertise without any real depth or thinking behind it. Like, this is why it's kind of a miracle I haven't broken my television yet, because every time I see a video on YouTube, it's like we created a brand in 10 minutes or 24 hours or 72 hours, and you watch the video, and it's like a logo in three colors, you just want to start screaming at the TV that's not a brand. But let me be clear, right? Like this isn't incompetence. Incompetence is obvious. This is more seductive. It passes that quick scan, right? It gets the nod. It sounds smart, but I think noise is the key word here. Because it's not one bad thing, it's not one off somebody sending you that comp or screenshot or deck or whatever it is, right? It's that constant kind of low-level hum, that constant low-level flow of almost right work. And it's made by people who aren't wrong for trying to do it. And I want to be really clear about this. I love working with CEOs that have ideas. I love working with CMOs. I love working with people that want to challenge me. I love, you know, somebody who I've always loved, you know, somebody in product or engineering who has an idea, who wants to be involved in the design process. So again, I think these are not people that are wrong for trying it. But I think it's the recognition that the output is not the outcome. In a lot of cases, I feel like it's starting to drown out what actually makes great work great work. Because it just sounds and it feels a little bit different. That the volume of output of those sort of things. And look, I think wherever I sat down to think about it, I think there's three ways that this is doing kind of real organizational damage. I think the first one is I'm seeing a lot of sort of just collapsing of accountability. Everybody touches everything, nobody knows, nobody owns anything. Like quality just doesn't have a home. That in a lot of cases, it's just, again, we are valuing the output. And as I told a client the other day, doing bad ideas faster is a win. And it's that sort of collapsing of accountability that I think is a problem. Then I think in a lot of cases, this is also really devaluing expertise at the worst possible moment. Because if a leader can get a plausible answer in five minutes, they stop seeing it why you need an expert that takes five days, we'll say, right? They think that expertise is the pace at which a problem is solved, not the quality with which it is solved. And look, I would say we can definitely like, look, I have a very small team that can produce work on a scale of a much, much bigger agency because of the way that we use AI. We are able to work much, much faster because of that. But there's also a lot of non-negotiables that go with that, that we are not going to devalue our expertise. We're not going to devalue our thinking. This is a concept that goes back to the very, very beginning of this show, talking about for me, for every creative, for anybody that produces anything, that your value is not on the commoditized side of execution. Your value is in your thinking, your strategy, your ability to see blue sky, your ability to differentiate from the norm. And I think that's where we are confusing that because an answer comes quickly and sound smart that we aren't necessarily appreciating that in many cases, a lot of the models are sort of taking the middle or the medium, and it is not going to be that differentiated. Because I think that for me is probably the biggest damage that I'm seeing is that this is sort of creating the lowest common denominator culture. Because if plausible gets a pre, if people stop reaching for excellent or better, right? Like why spend two weeks on something when you know you can get through 70% of it in an hour? The standard drips. Nobody notices it, nobody kind of speaks it out. It just happens, and then it gets really hard to reverse. And I think that's that look, I think ultimately for me, that's the problem here is that what's going to happen isn't going to necessarily be about the tools. It's going to be about the culture. It's going to be about the standard of who is just going to take good enough versus who's going to see this as a force multiplier to do things faster and better. And again, I think that's going to be the problem. And look, and I think this is the part that stains. I'm going to include myself here, right? That we we as just anybody, not just creatives, anybody, right? We like to show the output and we don't necessarily show the thinking. This is feedback I have given for 20 years on almost every portfolio I've seen, every creative career I got asked to, you know, comment on. We delivered the logo of the campaign, the product, but we don't talk about why the decisions were right. So when someone compares our work to what they got in 10 minutes, the gap there feels smaller than what it is because the depth in the thinking becomes invisible. And this is what seven years ago, seven years ago, whenever I was at Envision, we did the whole design frontier, looking at the gap between the impact and creativity and the reality of its execution. That was the warning sign out of that. Was like, look, we have got to get out of the execution of space. We have to demonstrate our value. And honestly, I think that's why so many creatives that I talk to hate AI. I think, look, for everybody who thinks I'm innovative, and everybody who thinks I'm the lazy idiot for using AI, you're both right. I can see both perspectives. But I think that's that's the thing, is that you know, at the end of this, we've made the depth too invisible. And this is not a new problem for our industry. And again, this is not about making the work slower. This isn't making it about more bureaucratic. It's about making the reasoning visible and legible. Because as long as expertise only lives in your head, anyone with a good enough tool can approximate your output. And nobody's going to be able to tell the difference. And look, I think this is going to be a real wake-up call for a lot of people in this industry, if it isn't already, that a lot of the anxiety you're feeling, a lot of the feel you're fearing, feeling is probably because too much of your career is based on the executional side and not enough on the creative side. And look, maybe I'm an idiot. God knows it wouldn't be the first time. But I think this is why I've embraced it. This is why I've done this. Because as a storyteller, as a strategist, as a creative, I love the speed at which we can move, the way we can think, the way we can use AI as a sparring further. But for too many of us, this plausible noise trend has a real cost. I think that it is just a cost that is deferred, that we're not going to see come home to roost for a little bit yet. That that, you know, look, the brands that drift from like six people that are writing copy in six different tones that like that doesn't show up on the spreadsheet. But ideas that like so many of the AIs have turned into yesmen that'll tell you that every idea is great. It's going to show in brands that start to get really generic. It's going to show up in customers that can't tell what you stand for. It's going to show up in a sales cycle that gets longer and nobody knows why. It's going to show up in these, you know, UX mock UI mock-ups from like somebody who quote unquote figured out UX, and the cost doesn't show up until like your adoption craters. And I think that this is the thing, is that for so many companies, that feedback loop, that data loop, the ability to pull data that tells the story that we want is just going to make this damage slower and more invisible. But the reality is going to be it's going to accumulate. And when it surfaces, it's going to be as this almost like unrecognizable as an original problem, right? Like it's going to be almost impossible to fix. And that's why companies keep letting it happen, because there's no immediate consequence that once again, we're valuing output over outcome. And here's the hard, here's the uncomfortable truth. And I think if you know me, I am genetically wired to say this stuff. But look, plausible noise is winning, not because the tools are too powerful. It's winning because leadership, I think, in too many cases, doesn't know what good looks like. And if they don't know, they'll always choose fast and cheap. And because for them, there's no perceived cost in doing that. That's why we're seeing so many companies are laying off all of these people. And look, in some cases, there are jobs that are 100% going to be disruptive. There are teams that are going to be downsized that that look, like I said, that was the whole reason why I built the model that I built was because I genuinely believe that. But the hard truth for every expert out there is that you can't defend the value of expertise if you can't show the difference between plausible and great. And to do that in a term, in a way that sort of a non-expert can understand. That sort of idea, I this is this is such a long joke for me, right? Like that idea of like designers sort of going off wearing a brain, doing a watercolor or a spirit animal, telling people like, oh no, trust me, this is better, and you don't understand design, that that's not a strategy anymore. And like I said, I've been preaching for whatever, 10, 15, 20 years, that it never was. We spent decades asking clients to take our word for it. And this is a world where, again, they can get plausible in an hour, in 20 minutes, and then your expertise is dying. And I see it already, right? I have CEOs, I have clients that are like, oh, you know, we took whatever the strategy was you did, and we passed it through Claude and asked it to think like Seth Godin, and this is what it said. Looks good. Usually it does like 15 pages of output, read smart. Right. But that's the thing. Where the rubber meets the road and the difference between sounding smart and being smart, it there's a difference there. And here's the stuff that I think we have got to start thinking about undoing. One is that we need to name this problem. We need to give plausible noise a word inside of your organization. Use that one, use another one, right? Like, and again, this isn't being condescending about it, it's being more diagnostic, right? But in saying things like, look, this is plausible. Don't fight it, don't run away from it, don't like act scared, because then again, you're just gonna feed into the problem. But to sit down and look at it and say, look, this is really good, but here's what we're gonna lose if we ship this. Because then I think, and again, this is such a long-standing theme on this show. There's a difference between thinking and behavior, right? Too many and most organizations cannot change. 75% of them fail to change because they just triage behavior, the way people talk and little things like that. They aren't changing the underlying culture and they aren't changing the thinking, right? You've got to name the pattern and you've got to interpret it. I think you've got to make your thinking visible. You've got to show that brief before you show the work. You've got to show the journey, you've got to talk about, right, like what you're solving for. What did you try? Why didn't you make this called? Make your judgment visible, make it legible, right? Because again, I think that's what's going to separate you and the ability to experiment. And that's my thing, right? Like prototype fast and then be able to go out there and kill slow. Like that ability to define what your standard is out loud, right? What does, and I think for most organizations, this is the part that they're going to have to do that in too many cases, this is going to be what's going to separate the companies that really excel and the ones that sort of fall back into this generic mess. Is how do you define that standard out loud, right? Like what does great actually mean in your company and in your world? Can you write it down? Can you be specific? Because I've done this work for 15 or 20 years. What the output of that is is never rocket science, right? When we do the pink elephants exercise, the stuff I've talked about on stages for forever. None of it is rocket science. It never is and it never will be. The rocket science comes from writing it down, being specific, articulating it, defending it, evolving it, because if you can't defend it, then somebody with a faster tool is going to make that call for you. And I think that this is going to be the challenge of where we are, not just for creatives, right? I think a lot in creative and marketing, we're in the crosshairs more than kind of maybe a lot of other professions, but this is it. This plausible noise is only going to get louder. The tools are only going to get better. But look, then this is what I see is that there's an opening for people that are willing to hold the standard. There are people, and look, this isn't going to be the defining point, I think. We're going to see who's really creative and who's been pretending. Right? There's going to be the storytellers and there's going to be the copycats. We have to make our thinking visible. We have to be willing to open up and be the person in the room that knows the difference and can explain the difference between plausible and great. And if you can be that person, I think you're going to succeed. If you can't be that person, then that again, you're going to allow for what you do to become commoditized and run over and let the speed win and think that people will know the difference. Should they know the difference? Yes. Should our work value be valued more? Yes. Has that been true in the last couple hundred years? No. You've got to be that person because that's the thing. I think this is the card that's underneath. Like we're all caught up in the tools and we're all caught up in all this other stuff, but it's this. It's this plausible noise that again is going to be the thing that defines us. It's going to be the thing that defines you, your career, your organization is how you deal with this. And can you step up and bring the idea? Can you bring the results? Can you curate and do what that is? If you can, I think you're going to succeed. If you can't, you're going to this, it's not going to get easier. And I think all that anxiety is going to come home to roost. And I just like you said, I think for me, this is the thing that I'm just seeing time and time again that we need to think about. But again, right? You've got to name it inside your organization. You've got to make your thinking visible and you've got to define that standard out loud, right? Don't accept a brief unless there is KPIs or something attached to it. Don't like again, that just going through the motions, the output. If you're going to define what you do by the output, you're screwed. You've got to get to the outcome. I just I don't know another way to say it. Maybe I haven't done the show in too long. Maybe I've just become a lot more battle-hardened by doing my own thing and separated from all the corporate BS, right? But like this is going to be that defining moment of where we're going to figure out what the new jobs look like going forward. So I don't know. Was I mean was this a lightning? Was it it's felt like more of a soapbox ramp, maybe, than what some of these normally are. But I just I'm seeing it every day and nobody's talking about it. We've got to start getting our shit together on this. Like I just I don't know another way to say it. So look, I'd love to hear from you, right? If you found great solutions from that, let me know. Like let's let's do we can do a kind of a listener show of like what are the problems that you're seeing? What are the solutions that you're finding? You found a great way through it, let me know. I'll share that back out with everybody. But there's gonna be a few more of these to come. Come back on the saddle, I'm fired up. I'm pissed off and always in the place that I love to be kind of sharing this stuff out. But again, I think um times are a change up. I'm excited about it. I'm I'm I'm I don't know, I'm having a lot of fun with it. But I don't know. Let me know where you're at with it. And hey, um, same thing as always. Same thing, it's a you know, as it always is. Like, you know, look, do me the favor, the same old thing, leave a review, tell a friend, share it, subscribe to the YouTube channel, like all that sort of stuff. And you know, too, shameless plug. Like, if you if you if your team needs some help with this, whether it's a talk, whether it's consulting, you got a project to work on, reach out. I'm doing this stuff every single day. And you know, Lord knows, I think uh I got another sphere of speaking truth to power. But um, hey, it's good to be back. Feels good, feels fun, and hey, as always, stay crazy.