M2 August 2026 Issue Editor’s Letter
In the week of going to print with this issue, Sam Altman went viral for all the wrong reasons after his suggestion of using AI to harness better quality time with your kids. His suggestion was to use ChatGPT to calendarise their events and interests, and use AI to create daily podcasts that you can listen to with them on the morning school run.
Thankfully, there was some sensible pushback against this, with the prevailing response being, “Here’s an idea, why not just talk to your kids?”
This response gives me some hope that we are not going to just walk blindly like lemmings into a dystopian future where we outsource the best parts of ourselves. It’s already like a bad episode of Black Mirror at times when I am cc’d on an email trail between people who are quite clearly having a conversation with each other via AI without truly understanding what is going on.
I get outsourcing writing. It’s hard. I have been doing it as a career for most of my working life and it still makes my head hurt. Plus, I have dyslexia, so I often have to wade through lines of red squiggles before publishing anything. I’m also highly distractible, so will take any excuse to sidetrack myself by researching something random that has nothing to do with what I am writing.
Did you know the Doppler effect is the change in the frequency or wavelength of a wave when the source and you move closer together or farther apart? As a moving object approaches, waves bunch up into a higher frequency; as it recedes, they stretch out into a lower frequency.
Anyway, I find writing hard, and it would make my day a lot easier if a machine did it. But I think the true beauty of writing is not so much the perfect approximation of prose based on a median law of averages against a massive dataset of prose. The real beauty of writing is in the act of trying to distil thinking, ideas and emotion, and communicating those things human to human.
It’s often not perfect and polished. But the most authentic ideas seldom are. This is how we evolve ideas, thinking and concepts. And this should be the last thing we give away.
Thankfully, this was an overriding theme at this year’s M2 AI Summits in Auckland and Christchurch. A lot of our keynote speakers are involved day to day in AI business transformation, but all spoke about the importance of human judgement, creativity and that cognitive layer, and also about not getting sucked in when AI gives you slick-sounding business strategy reports.
If you want to base your business strategy on what is pretty much a sycophantic predictive word tool, go right ahead, but the results will be commensurate.
We can outsource so many manual, time-sinking workflow tasks to AI. But let’s do it so that we can spend more time thinking deeply about our business, thinking clearly about what we actually want to email our colleagues or, heaven forbid, actually talking to our kids in the morning.