AI is the final boss of impostor syndrome

Everyone else always seem so confident. But it’s all a show: only few are truly confident, and we have names for them: cocky, cocksure, brash, smug, asshole. The rest of us just pretend. We fake confidence through repetition and emulating others who have more experience at it. When I got my BSc and first job I felt like hot shit. But when I arrived at Cambridge for a PhD I felt like the dumbest person alive who somehow got in because of some clerical error (thanks to Jorge Cham for putting it so beautifully relatable).

Years into it I began to realise that the people around me just have more practice at pretending to be confident, so that helped put things into perspective. Maybe, after all, I deserve to be in their company. I slowly re-built my confidence, but it never recovered to anywhere near youthful hot shit levels: I’ve been hiding impostor syndrome, like many around me.

To me, impostor syndrome is an internal amplifier, disconnected from reason or reality, that amplifies others’ capabilities and thus diminishes mine. It’s coupled to a doubt generator that feeds on falsehoods that I somehow find plausible.

Impostor syndrome can be debilitating. It holds you back from speaking up, writing, and doing. It makes you feel like your output isn’t worth the bits, paper, or materials because it’s so pedestrian: if I can do it, then anyone else can. It’s obviously untrue. People all over vomit trivialities and are hailed as luminaries; if only we could have that guy’s fake confidence!

It was hard enough when our imaginary betters were human, but now it’s AI: the unbeatable final boss of impostor syndrome. They’re actually something that appears to be so much better than us, and that produce ‘stuff’ much faster.

I was writing an exploratory report for a client when I had a minor panic attack: what if I’m charging good money for something that can be achieved in a fraction of the cost and time? Am I scamming my client now?! Using the anti-doubt tools that I developed, I convinced myself that in this case my perspective was worth it. But in other cases I will have to suggest that they use AI instead.

All this will require adjustments, and I’m thinking about what that may look like. The confidence that I have built will not be diminished by AI, but I may need to direct my efforts elsewhere. How are you dealing with it?