Proof of Humanity: Why Imperfection Is the New Trust Signal
In an age of AI perfection, your worst sketch might be your most powerful tool.
Posted May 13, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills
Imagine having your first-grader accused of using AI to create their crayon drawing.
Today it’s a gag cartoon. Tomorrow…who knows? Because we’re beginning to distrust more and more of the content we’re being served as having been created by a real person.
Take the latest PowerPoint you sat through. The presentation looks super-professional. The language seems correct and logical. The images are polished. Then...why does it seem so empty?
Maybe it’s because its makers jumped to a finished product before thinking it through.
Perhaps they abdicated their own thinking to an automated tool (out of a need for speed or to “enhance productivity ”), allowing themselves to serve up a product full of information or “content” but missing everything else.
Maybe they didn’t notice the difference. Maybe they thought their audience wouldn’t.
But even when you can’t quite put your finger on it, you still get the nagging feeling that something essential has been skipped over, left out, erased. That something is the imperfect, quirky, imaginative touch of one or more creative humans.
That perfection and finish itself is a fig leaf attempting to mask a deficit of real inspiration and emotional connection.
It signals alignment, consensus, and certainty, without having made the often messy effort to achieve it.
No wonder perfect slide decks often feel like a slick presentation of a case that hasn’t really been made…and people tune out, feel resentful, railroaded, disengaged. Especially when their own input has been ignored, buried, or overruled.
This has always been true…and now AI makes it even faster and easier to churn out beautiful, professional, and ultimately meaningless, soulless, and forgettable work.
If you feel a gnawing lack of trust in a colleague’s AI-generated presentation or report, it’s more than a feeling. A recent KPMG/University of Melbourne study found that 66 percent of people use AI output without evaluating it, 56 percent have made work mistakes because of it, and more than half have presented AI content as their own.*
In other words, people are presenting “thinking” that they haven’t actually thought about.
The solution is not to try to ignore or ban AI. Whether you like it or not, AI is a fact of life. Where there is a shortcut, humans will inevitably take it. How many people actually follow the advice to take the stairs instead of the escalator or park far from the store entrance, even though such practices are supposed to be good for their health?
And it’s not all bad news. AI can be an amazing tool to collapse the time for tedious, repetitive work or to create things that would have been out of reach before due to a lack of budget or technical skills.
What we fear most is how easily it can seem to replace us in ways that come uncomfortably close to our personal values and identity . Especially when we do miss that human element when it is lacking, as in so-called “AI slop” writing and the uncanny, unsettling finish of so many AI-generated visuals.
So what’s a human to do?
What not to do is to throw up our hands and accept our own obsolescence. If we’re going to work with the new tools, we need to be more human, not less.
I always think the first step is to pick up a marker. Especially if you think you “can’t draw.”
In meetings I’ve led with executives from 17 countries, turning off the slide projector and going to the whiteboard or flip chart was always where the work actually got done, and the participants behaved like people, not job titles.
Research confirms what anyone who’s ever grabbed a marker already knows: sketching isn’t just recording your thinking; it’s generating it. Stanford neuroscientist Judy Fan’s work on drawing as a cognitive tool shows we sketch to explain, to plan, and to discover.
Your messy, imperfect sketch does what no perfect presentation can: It maps out your thinking rather than placing it on a pedestal. It invites participation instead of shutting it down, making inclusion a visible reality instead of a corporate platitude.
Even when you’re all alone, the act of sketching it out actually helps you think things through in a way that words alone cannot.
A shared doodle creates the kind of belonging and psychological safety that even the most amazing slide deck has never produced. A co-created hand-drawing builds real consensus and shines a glaring spotlight on where we’ve only been pretending to agree.
The act of messily sketching things out together creates buy-in and co-ownership where everyone can become an individual champion of the idea. And it gives everyone a roadmap of what was decided, who is responsible, and what the ultimate vision is.
Most of all, it adds necessary friction at key moments, which AI would urge us to fast-forward through. This purposeful pause creates the space for creativity , imagination , and the kinds of quirky, illogical, but brilliant connections and breakthroughs that technology has not yet learned to replicate; the ones that make others instinctively say, “I love that!”
And not only do you not have to be an artist, but it’s also a plus if you suck at drawing. As I always say, “The worse it looks, the better it works.”
I like to call it “Proof of Humanity,” hence the title of this new column.
A rough drawing early on in the process says, “A real person was here, and actually thought about this.” It’s your fingerprint.
In a world where machines can fake everything, be brave enough to suck in public.
https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/be/pdf/trust-attitudes-and-use-of-ai-global-report-2025.pdf
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/doodles-descartes-sketching-and-human-cognitive-toolkit
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Lisa Rothstein is a New Yorker cartoonist, Fortune 500 visual thinking consultant, and author of Drawing Out Your Genius, proving human imperfection is the ultimate advantage in an AI world.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.