Recently, fans of Tolkien (and quite a few others) were left confused by Elon Musk’s assertion  that the citizens of small towns in England, Scotland and Ireland were “living their lives like Hobbits … lovely people who like to smoke their pipe and have nice meals and everything is pleasant”,  that is until one day  “1,000 people show up in your village of 500 and start raping the kids”.   A few days before Musk had launched his internet encyclopaedia, Grokipedia – “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” fact-checked by his AI variant Grok.

Obsessions are nothing new for Musk and a persistent one of his  has been about the outstanding success of Wikipedia. I can remember being sceptical of Wiki when it first came out, but over its 20 years have come to appreciate something wonderful about a world wide community that shares and brings knowledge together and in the process does some pretty rapid (by old standards but still fast enough!) fact checking. Yes, it does get things wrong but if you, like me,  are still using Google in a conventional way, it is usually  possible to verify things that might seem awry.   Whilst Musk’s obsessions with “Wokepedia” stem from its alleged left wing bias, I wonder if what is more riling, is the human democratic nature of Wikipedia and fact that one of the world’s top 4 websites is a non-profit.  In 2023 ( and reiterated this year), Musk offered the Wikipedia Foundation $1 billion to change its name for one year to Dikipedia.

When Grokipedia was launched, the Guardian concluded “from publishing falsehoods to pushing far-right ideology, Grokipedia gives chatroom comments equal status to research”, while others found that huge chunks had actually  been sucked directly from the rubbished Wikipedia.

So what has this got to do with coaching ?

Coaching provides a space where people, through a process of questioning can make sense of their context, gain insight into their place within it and how they can realise their agency, and commit to actions that can take them closer to their goals and ambitions.  Increasingly coaches are working with people who are questioning  their own roles, feelings and their sense of being  in the world of AI and Large Language Models. 

As the Deputy Director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge has noted, “we live in a moment where there is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight.”

 Apparently, school teachers who once might have laboured for hours over nuance and subtlety, now push school reports through  the “machine”.   A colleague recently expressed her dismay at the eagerness of people using AI to produce conclusions that  they themselves can’t explain.

Coaching involves making sense. The process facilitates reaching an understanding that can withstand some testing. My truth will be different to others’ truths and I expect it will be different to Elon Musk’s.  Good coaching will ask people to check  the filters on world views.   The coach is not there to “fact check” but may want to make  sure the client has had a chance to. Coaching  involves drawing on one’s own evidence to reach conclusions that can be articulated so that they can be tested and to use this to reason ways forward. It involves ownership of thought, ownership of action, and ownership of consequence.

This is not a pointless Luddite’s call to ignore the potential value of our new technology and how it can be used to for the good of humankind.  But it is a call to be wary of sleepwalking into a world where we abandon our agency in thinking altogether. And there is a role for coaching in that.