Entrepreneur Anupam Mittal issued a warning against generating ideas through artificial intelligence on Monday — calling it a major ‘red flag’ for managers and founders. The Shark Tank India judge voiced concern about the growing trend of using AI to churn out ideas and insisted that “outsourcing judgement isn’t leadership”. Mittal noted that platforms such as ChatGPT could only ‘fake intelligence’ by generating information based on existing material.
‘Polite sycophancy’
“A founder recently bragged: ‘‘I get all my ideas from ChatGPT.’ He thought it was a flex. I saw a red flag. Because Gen AI mostly averages existing knowledge. It sounds brilliant…smooth, confident, articulate. But too often it’s just platitudes and polite sycophancy,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
The Shaadi.com founder said he had seen cases where senior leaders sent out elaborate emails that “read like genius” but actually meant nothing. Mittal added that it became pretty obvious upon closer scrutiny that these AI-written missives were merely “senseless copy pasting”. A similar pattern was also being found in decks, pitches, even ‘strategy notes’ — with materials “churned out start-to-finish by a model”.
“The best managers and founders I know use AI for speed and structure. But the instinct, the angles, the contrarian call, the uncomfortable decision? That’s all on them. My take: AI can fake intelligence. It can’t fake courage or an original point of view,” he reiterated.
AI is reducing diversity of ideas
According to recent research published in Nature Human Behaviour, participants that used ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas could only come up with a short list. The study revealed that 94% of the participants given the prompt to invent toys with a brick and a fan (one of many examples) came up with nearly identical ideas like “Build-a-Breeze Castle. Meanwhile their purely human counterparts produced human entirely unique solutions.
“Reliance on ChatGPT for idea generation comes with a trade-off: while enhancing individual ideas’ creativity, it reduces the diversity of ideas in a pool of ideas—a critical element for effective brainstorming,” the researchers wrote in their abstract.
The growing homogeneity can have a severe impact on multiple industries — producing undifferentiated products and weakening the ability of a company to stand out in competitive markets.