Why AI doesn’t yet enter a room and captivate everyone with charisma and presence

Charisma is probably one of the vaguest terms in the field of leadership. It has something unfathomable, fascinating, sometimes even dangerous about it, and the word itself also feels a little outdated. Artificial intelligence leaves no stone unturned – so it is worth taking a closer look at whether and how the topic of charisma is changing through artificial intelligence.

Charism-AI? Leadership between Spark, Feeling, and ChatGPT

In everyday language, the term charisma is often strongly associated with radiance and persuasive impact. ChatGPT also does this and claims that charisma has traditionally been closely linked to “personal radiance, emotional intelligence, presence, and persuasiveness.” From a purely psychological point of view, this is not entirely correct. All the aspects mentioned concern style and personal effect, but charisma cannot be thought of without substantive messages. Leaders become charismatic because they stand for an idea, a mission, or a goal that is perceived as particularly attractive by a certain target group and activates desires or hopes for the future. The stylistic element is important in order to transport this message successfully. But with presence and rhetoric alone, no one will be charismatic who has nothing of substance to say. People follow leaders AND an idea, and then a charismatic effect emerges.

Radiance Reloaded: Who Leads When Charisma Becomes Programmable?

At least for now, leadership takes place between people. Charismatic effects occur between people. When a particular message or a particular leader reaches a particular target group, then an invisible bond is woven that explains the willingness to commit to the charismatic idea. If you want to work on your own charisma, you therefore have two starting points to do so:

1. The first starting point concerns the message you want to stand for. What is your own charismatic idea? With which idea could you succeed in motivating people to participate, because people trust that with you as a leader, the promised goals can be achieved? A small test has shown: ChatGPT can already help here. If you ask ChatGPT, for example, how a change needs to be communicated so that as many people as possible can identify with the idea, ChatGPT can provide ideas here – a little frustrating for those who see charisma as a deeply human phenomenon, but unfortunately true.
2. And of course, in the future there will also be a number of ways to further develop one’s own persuasiveness and communication impact with AI support. Those who want to give a charismatic speech can first gather feedback on the content, but those who additionally want to test their communication and rhetorical behavior will also quickly find the appropriate tools here.

AI cannot be charismatic, but AI can, under certain circumstances, help people to “read” target groups better, to adapt messages better, and to convey them more convincingly.

Deep Impact or Deep Fake: Light and Shadow

Charisma lives to a great extent from the authenticity of people who stand for a particular idea and objective and communicate for it with conviction. If all this takes place in an AI-optimized way, then a certain danger of “over-engineering” is certainly present, and the question remains whether one is able to convey AI-generated messages, which have been optimized in terms of maximum audience alignment, as authentically as ideas that arose only through natural intelligence. If communication itself even takes place in a synthetic way, the “deep fake” danger is even greater. There have been many great charismatics in history who did not take the truth too seriously, but the less clear it is which sources can still be trusted and the more algorithms help ensure that every person receives the messages to which they respond most strongly, the more difficult it becomes to know whom one can really still trust.

But here the circle closes: trust is a central ingredient of the invisible bond that connects leaders and the people who follow them. This dynamic will remain, even if it may become more difficult to decide to whom we should give our trust.

Recommendations for Action

• If you have to represent a charismatic message, e.g. in the context of a change or a challenging goal: feel free to get help by using ChatGPT to “sound out” what fears and hopes your target group has and how you can frame your project in messages so that it is maximally resonant. Resonance means that the “invisible bond” is tied!
• If you are preparing communication of your charismatic message, then of course you must be able to present it in such a way that people believe you are capable of carrying out your project. You have to convey the strength and competence required – if that doesn’t work, people won’t follow you. Here too, you can of course “sound out” – but at least at the moment, AI will not yet replace the personal feedback of trusted feedback-givers.
• Still, stay true to yourself, even if it is absolutely legitimate to get help from artificial intelligence. It will be an important future skill to deal critically with AI results. If you only use the results from ChatGPT as “copy-paste,” then something will be missing. It is fine to trust AI to some extent, but trust even more in your own judgment and intuition. Then you can implement the best of both worlds.

Music tip from our AI for this article 😉🤖: