Anyone can use their favorite LLM to produce content now. A report. An article. A strategy document. A presentation. Give it a prompt, wait a few minutes, and you have something that looks finished. That’s creating a new problem.

Some companies are already having to check whether people’s work was AI-generated. But I think that misses the bigger issue. I don’t care if you used AI. I care whether the work is any good.

Just because you can ask an LLM to produce a report in five minutes doesn’t mean you’ve become more productive. If the output is mediocre, generic, wrong, or simply something you didn’t bother to think through, you’ve just produced more output.

Output for output’s sake is not productivity.

And there’s another problem: mediocre AI-generated work pushes the burden upstream.

Now the manager has to review it. Question it. Verify it. Correct it. Ask what the person actually thinks. You saved yourself twenty minutes and created an hour of work for someone else. This is not productivity.  Of course, “great work” is subjective. And many organizations haven’t even defined what great looks like. They don’t have a high bar, or sometimes any bar at all.

AI makes that problem more visible because producing something that looks like work has never been easier. I’m going through this myself. Recently, someone on my team brought me a report. He had used Perplexity to create it. That was fine. What wasn’t fine was that he hadn’t really checked it, challenged it, improved it, or added much of his own thinking.

I asked him: “Is this your best piece of work?” “No,” he said. “Then come back when you’re proud of what you bring back.”

Because I can go into Perplexity myself and ask it to generate a report. It takes a few minutes. That’s not the value I need from another person. I need judgment. I need insight. I need someone to notice what the AI missed. To challenge weak assumptions. To connect ideas. To make the work clearer, sharper, more useful, and more original.

AI can give you a starting point. It can accelerate the work. But it doesn’t remove your responsibility for the final product’s quality. If your name is on it, you own it. And the standard shouldn’t be: “Did you use AI?”

The standard should be: “Is this your best piece of work?”