AI and the importance of the human narrative

The relationship between machine and human is often described using battle metaphors: ‘AI destroys human work’, or ‘AI wins the battle on creating a cartoon’. When viewed as a battle, the narrative on the side of AI has been a great deal more forcefully described. Supported by tech firms, tech consultancies and tech writers, the case for the dominance of AI is powerfully made. Take for example the 2023 McKinsey Report in which a group of tech experts report their belief that Gen AI will substantially replace many tasks that seem essentially human – creativity, empathy, judgement.

It seems to me that the case for the human side of the relationship needs to be made as forcefully. Here are some ideas for the foundation of the narrative about the human side of the equation.

Let’s begin with the nature of work itself. Yes, work can be bad – dreary, repetitive, uninspiring and possibly even dangerous. And certainly, the quicker automation is able to replace this type of work the better. Yet for most of us, work and the activities of working form an essential scaffolding to our lives. It is through work we flex and develop our skills; we build connections and networks potentially with a diverse group of people; we make friends, we laugh, argue, feel frustrated and angry; we receive tough feedback and through that push back, we explore our character and values. There is a notion that the absence of work would somehow project us back to the bucolical days of Jane Austen characters languishing around drawing rooms and reading books – or indeed those warm evenings philosophising in ancient Greece. This projection is neither realistic nor deliverable. We know what it is to have no work – and those studies of unemployed people point to the loneliness and lack of purpose that people without work can feel. So, in the machine-human relationship we must focus less on the ‘end of work’ and more on the ‘end of boring, uninspiring, dangerous work’. And to do that we must be a great deal more thoughtful about destroying work that is potentially good.

Now let’s consider the nature of the speed of work. Certainly, when it comes to some types of knowledge based work, studies show the work of people who use Chat GPT is rated higher than those without access to the technology. Looking more closely at the reasons for this boost in performance, it is likely that when working with Gen AI, the rapid and easy access to a world of information speeds the process of finding and reporting this information. These studied use timed tasks – so speed is an important element. The productivity boost is so significant that I counsel my MBA students to use Gen AI and I use it in my own work. But it is important to remember that whilst Gen AI widens and speeds the search for information – it does little more than this. And this leads me to a narrative about the nature of human creativity.

Now it turns out I have already written this book – and am in my final edit. It’s taken three years, beginning with memories of my working life, describing how I had seen and been inspired by weavers, sharing emotions about work, describing conversations with others about friendship, fate, wisdom. In other words, whilst the outcome was a creative object – the process (the memories, stories, conversations) was also creative. And it’s this process of creativity that I believe is being undervalued. Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves what a Large Language Model is. A LLM works by taking the prompt and then through large scale probability, identifies the most likely next word in the sentence. A LLM does not feel or look at the world, it does not have memories or stories, it does not dream of the future.

So here is the problem with my DeepSeek experiment. Imagine I had asked the question about the ideas of the book at the start of the process (rather than the end). The book structure the machine developed could be read as a series of directions. And following those directives would I believe, have fast become a dispiriting, administrative task. It would have taken away the joy, annoyance, frustration, conversations I had over those three years of development.

What is important here – on the human side of the equation, is the process as much as the outcome. But by focusing on speed and outcome, the machine invites us to devalue the messy, unpredictable journey that is the journey of human development. For example, when a machine automates the work of a junior lawyer, it takes away the process of trial and error that historically supported their development. When a machine writes the outline of a book, it takes away the creative journey.

This is not a luddite argument, and neither is it a plea to look backwards. Machines and the capacity to automate tasks has the potential to both remove unpleasant and boring tasks, to increase the reliability and quality of some tasks, and to make what is left of work more enjoyable and rewarding. But, it is crucial that as we embrace these possibilities, we build a narrative about what it is to be human, that is as compelling as the narrative about what it is to be a machine. Building that human narrative requires us, in the push for automation, to differentiate between bad work and good work. That human narrative also requires us to understand how humans work, and to acknowledge not simply on the outcome, but also the messy and unpredictable journey of human development.

Professor Lynda Gratton recently participated in London Business School’s Think Ahead series discussion event, ‘The Workforce Shift: Adapting to Ageing, Automation, and AI’. The discussion, which took place on 12 February 2025, explored the future of work, examining the interplay between an ageing population, rapidly changing technologies, and lifelong learning.

 

An award-winning thought leader, writer and speaker, Professor Gratton is the founder of the global research advisory practice HSM Advisory As a Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, Professor Gratton teaches executives and MBA students about the future of work. Professor Gratton is the co-author of the internationally acclaimed, 100-Year Life. With her co-author, LBS Professor Andrew J Scott, Professor Gratton outlines the challenges and intelligent choices that all of us, of any age, need to make in order to turn greater life expectancy into a gift and not a curse. This is not an issue for when we are old, Gratton and Scott argue, but an urgent and imminent one.

This article was first published in Forbes magazine on 17^th February 2025.