I saw a post from someone on Facebook recently that announced she was deleting ChatGPT from her phone, declaring 2026 the year to honour that which is made by human hands. The post attracted lots of comments from others celebrating their own rejection of AI tools. Reading through the responses, I saw relief, virtue signalling, and most worryingly, permission to stop learning.
This isn’t just about one Facebook post. Extrapolate it to our profession and we’re talking about an entire profession of qualified coaches who are already struggling to find clients, now being told that the tools that could help them are somehow morally wrong. When 80% of coaches fail within two years, not because they’re bad coaches but because they can’t attract clients, we need to ask ourselves whether this anti-AI movement is helping or harming our profession.
The Environmental Argument
Let’s start with the environmental argument, because it’s the one that sounds most noble. The impact on the environment in terms of water use is shocking, the original poster wrote. This claim has been repeated so often that many accept it as fact, but the reality is rather different.
According to OpenAI’s own data, one ChatGPT query uses about 0.34 watt-hours of energy. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the same as 16 seconds of Netflix streaming, or what an LED lightbulb uses in a couple of minutes. If you’re worried about the environmental impact of AI, you should probably stop streaming TV first.
The water usage claims are similarly overblown. Yes, data centres use water for cooling, but the amounts per query are tiny compared to almost any other daily activity. Making a cup of coffee uses more water than a month of ChatGPT queries, yet I don’t see anyone rejecting the concept of coffee shops, or declaring they’re giving up coffee to save the planet.
Why AI Produces “Shit” (And Why That’s Not AI’s Fault)
The original post complained about AI churning out shit faster to feed the social media algorithms, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening at all. If I only speak from my own professional stand point, what I see is what content created using AI, by coaches who hope what they have produced will attract coaching clients. They the coaches publish whatever AI spits out without editing or refinement.
This is the equivalent of blaming Microsoft Word for bad novels. The tool isn’t the problem, the lack of skill is.
When coaches use AI for marketing without understanding what effective client acquisition looks like, they get generic, formulaic content because they’re asking generic, formulaic questions. They don’t know enough about marketing to recognise poor output, so they publish it anyway. Then everyone points at the result and says, “See? AI is terrible!”
The Real Victims of AI Rejection
While established coaches with strong networks can afford to take principled stands against technology, newer coaches, or those without established networks don’t have that luxury. They’re the ones who suffer when influential voices tell them that using efficiency tools is somehow cheating or inauthentic.
Consider what we’re really saying when we tell struggling coaches to avoid AI:
- Spend hours writing blog posts from scratch instead of using AI to create drafts you can refine
- Agonise over every piece of content instead of generating options to inspire you
- Take days to create course outlines instead of hours
- Struggle alone with your marketing copy instead of having an intelligent assistant to bounce ideas off
For coaches who are already overwhelmed, underpaid, and struggling to find clients, this isn’t helpful advice, it’s a recipe for continued failure.
What Good AI Use Looks Like
At The Coaching Revolution, we teach coaches to use AI as a sophisticated tool, not a magic button. Here’s what that means in practice:
Strategy First: Before touching any AI tool, understand what you’re trying to achieve. You need to have chosen a niche in which you have credibility, to have created an empathetic and ethical marketing message and to have clear goals. AI can’t create strategy from nothing, but it can help you execute strategy more efficiently.
Context is Everything: Give AI detailed context about your target audience (or niche – same thing) and the specific situation your chosen audience has found themselves in. Give it a detailed marketing message that demonstrates your knowledge and understanding of said audience, your empathy for their situation and your professional tone of voice. The more context you provide, the better the output.
Always Edit: Treat AI output as a first draft, never a finished product. Every piece needs your human touch, your expertise, and your unique perspective.
Learn From the Process: Use AI interactions to deepen your own understanding. If the output isn’t quite right, work out why and refine your approach.
An Historical Comparison
Remember when we proudly declared we didn’t do email or weren’t on social media? Where are those coaches now? Most of them eventually realised they’d cut themselves off from the very people they wanted to serve.
AI is following the same trajectory as electricity, the internet, and smartphones in that it’s becoming part of the infrastructure of modern life. You can choose to reject it, but you can’t stop its adoption, and you can’t protect yourself from competitors who use it well.
The coaches who spent the 2000s declaring they didn’t need the internet are now desperately trying to catch up. The same will happen with AI, except the timeline will be compressed from decades to years.
Virtue Signalling
What troubles me most about the anti-AI movement is how it is dressing up fear as virtue. I prefer a messy human, complete with actual sentences and typos, the original poster wrote, as if using tools to improve our communication somehow makes us less human.
This is particularly rich if we consider that it was coming from someone typing on a phone, using spell-check, posting on a platform powered by algorithms and reaching an audience through internet infrastructure. We all use technology, the question is whether we use it thoughtfully or reject it performatively.
The Path Forward
The coaching profession faces real challenges and too many qualified coaches struggle to build sustainable businesses. In addition, too many potential clients never find the help they need because a) they didn’t know that coaching could help and b) coaches don’t know how to articulate the value of coaching. These problems won’t be solved by rejecting tools that could help.
Instead of declaring war on AI, we should be learning to use it effectively. That means understanding both its capabilities and its limitations, learning to prompt effectively, and always maintaining the human element.
Yes, there’s plenty of AI-generated rubbish out there, but that’s not an argument against AI any more than failing to put a shelf up is an argument against power drills. It’s an argument for education, for standards, and for treating AI as what it is – a powerful tool that amplifies whatever skills and knowledge you bring to it. Conversely, it is useless if you’re bringing a lack of knowledge and skill.
The coaches who thrive in the next decade won’t be the ones who rejected AI on principle, they’ll be the ones who learned to use it as naturally as they now use email, social media, and video calls. They’ll produce better content, reach more clients, and have more time to focus on what they love most – coaching.
The choice isn’t between human creativity and artificial intelligence, it’s between adapting to useful tools or getting left behind while insisting you’re taking a principled stand. I know which future I’m preparing my coaches for and it’s not the one where we pretend technology doesn’t exist.
An Opportunity
If you disagree with me and would like the chance for a robust conversation about this why not join my free challenge, Nail Your Niche? We’ve updated the challenge to utilise AI to help coaches reach the ‘penny drop’ moment more quickly and with more clarity.
We run it a few times every year and there’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT) – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations!
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