A conversation with young people changed how I think about AI, trust, and hiding.
“AI should be banned.”
I didn’t expect that.
Recently, I sat down with a group of young people expecting the usual. Curiosity. Excitement. The energy that comes every time some new technology arrives.
Instead, disdain.
- “It doesn’t feel authentic.”
- “I don’t trust people using it.”
- “How do I even know who I’m talking to anymore?”
They weren’t afraid of the technology. They were afraid of losing the person underneath it.
Turns out, they weren’t alone. A 2026 Gallup survey of Gen Z found that while many young people are using AI regularly, skepticism about it is rising. They’re using it. But they don’t necessarily feel good about it.
The concern isn’t really the technology. It’s what the technology makes invisible.
(And I want to say something clearly before we go further: I love AI. At its best, it gives us back time. Time to be more curious. More creative. More human. That is not the problem.)
The problem is what we do with that time. If we use it to think deeper, we gain. If we use it to hide better, we lose something we may not get back.
AI Doesn’t Create Hiding. But It Does Accelerate It.
My work for years has centered around hiding and unhiding.
The ways we protect ourselves. Perform. Over-polish. Try not to be found out.
Most people aren’t hiding because they’re dishonest. They’re hiding because they’re human.
We hide uncertainty. Confusion. The quiet voice that says, “I don’t actually know the answer to that.”
AI gives hiding a technological upgrade.
Now the performance can sound polished almost instantly. Perfectly written emails. Words that sound like you but aren’t.
I noticed the temptation in myself. The other day I caught myself using AI to organize a thought I hadn’t fully sat with yet. It sounded clearer immediately. Smarter even. But for a second, I wondered: did I clarify my thinking? Or did I skip over it?
We may be moving toward a world where we’re talking AI to AI while the humans quietly disappear underneath it.
The Hiding Tax
For years, I’ve asked audiences one question: What are you hiding?
I’ve collected more than 1,200 anonymous responses.
One of them said:
“I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m terrified someone is going to find out.”
That was before AI became a workplace tool.
Now imagine that same person discovering they can generate a “perfect” answer to almost anything in seconds.
The hiding gets easier. The gap between who they are and how they appear gets wider.
I call it the hiding tax. And I think AI is adding interest to it.
What Hiding Does to Innovation
What worries me most is that this doesn’t just affect trust. It affects innovation too.
Because innovation doesn’t come from sounding smart. It comes from wrestling out loud before the answer is fully formed. From bad drafts. Half-formed ideas. The courage to say: “I’m not sure yet, but…”
But people don’t do that when they’re busy managing perception. If every idea arrives polished and optimized, we may accidentally innovate the humanity right out of innovation itself.
What Actually Gave Me Hope
What gave me hope was those young people pushing back.
They still care about what’s real. They still want to know there’s an actual person underneath the words.
That’s not an argument against AI. That’s an argument for us. For staying curious. For wrestling with hard ideas instead of outsourcing the wrestle. For using the time AI gives us to go deeper, not to disappear.
Maybe we haven’t lost our hunger for what’s real. We’re just going to have to protect it more intentionally now.
That’s what unhiding is for.
The Leadership Opportunity No One is Talking About
Leaders have a bigger role now than ever. Not just managing productivity. But protecting trust in a world where trust is getting harder to verify.
That starts with step one of Unhidden Leadership™: Acknowledge.
Acknowledge what you don’t know. Where you’re still learning. Where you got it wrong. Not to perform vulnerability, but because the people around you are watching to see if it’s safe to be human here.
In a world full of generated certainty, saying “I don’t know yet” is radical.
Saying “I wrote this myself, and I’m still working it out” builds something AI cannot replicate: trust that there is a real person in the room.
Your honesty isn’t a weakness in an AI world. It’s your competitive advantage.
Where are you letting AI speak for you instead of wrestling with the thoughts yourself?
P.S. I work with executive leadership teams, ERGs, and internship programs to build workplaces where people don’t feel they have to hide in order to succeed.
Thank you for being part of the UNHIDING community.
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