Does Lena Dunham have a point about thought leadership?

“I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice of a generation.”

So speaks Hannah Horvath in the pilot episode of ‘Girls’ – one of my favourite quotes from the award-winning HBO series. 

Good news, then, that ‘Girls’ will be returning to our screens ten years after the series finale aired. 

In her statement, the show’s creator, Lena Dunham said: “We always said we would only return to ‘Girls’ if there was a specific story we were burning to tell.” 

“I’ve missed these characters,” she said, “but for a long time I couldn't quite picture them in the present day. Then, right around my fortieth birthday, they started talking to me in the shower. And, as you may remember, once this fivesome starts talking it's pretty hard to get them to stop.”

In this era of AI slop, this sentiment struck me as both refreshing and strangely nostalgic. Only saying something when you really have something to say is how we used to approach thought leadership content in the Before Times (before AI, of course). 

Today, LLMs mean that anyone can generate a passable LinkedIn post or opinion piece in seconds. Prompt ChatGPT to give you ten thought leadership ideas on your area of expertise; pick one and ask it to write 800 words; give it a quick edit, and you’re done. 

Easy? Yes. Thoughtful? Insightful? Really not.

We tend to talk about thought leadership as a content problem. We need more articles to post more frequently. Our competitors are saying XYZ and so, therefore, must we.

But real thought leadership starts earlier than that, with good ol’ fashioned ideas. What have you noticed that other people have overlooked? What do you think everyone is getting wrong? What has happened in your work that has changed your mind about something?

Then, the process of writing forces us to work out what we are trying to say – it is part of the thinking. An argument that sounds brilliant in your head can become less brilliant when you try to explain it in 700 words or less. There are gaps and contradictions, and your favourite sentence doesn’t help your argument, after all. 

LLMs are extremely good at smoothing this process out. Give ChatGPT a collection of half-formed thoughts and it can make them sound coherent and superficially insightful. The ease of generation, this unnatural polish, has led us to forget what good thought leadership writing should do: start conversations, sway opinion, and even drive change. 

Importantly, thought leadership is content that is shared with the world with your name stamped across it. By publishing it, you’re giving it your personal seal of approval. You say: these are my views, based on my experience and judgement. If the content is below par, what does that say about your ideas?

AI can imitate the language of expertise very convincingly, but it cannot supply the lived experience or human judgement behind it. It is useful for organising research, interrogating an argument, finding ways to improve, but we should use it only once we have something authentic to say, not before.

There is already a lot of content out there. And now that producing even more of it takes seconds, it’s increasingly important to show some restraint. Unlike Hannah Horvath, you may not be the voice of your generation, but you can still learn from Lena, and wait to write until you have a really good story that only you can tell.