The New Imposter Syndrome
Not knowing the origin of your own thoughts
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Friends,
For most of my life I have felt like an imposter.
When I said this to a friend recently, he told me he had felt the same for decades, in every role, in every room. I’ve said it to other people since. Almost nobody disagrees. We have all been winging it, nobody knows anything with full certainty, and we make judgement calls about the work, about who we are, about what to do next, and we take the step.
I remember the first time I started my first job. I did not feel worthy enough to be there, and then I opened my mouth and said something, and I realised I did have a voice. That happens to most of us - we actually do have a brain and an opinion. Wisdom and learning accumulate over years and the result is what other people see as skill, or perception, or value.
The question imposter syndrome asks is whether your perceived value is bigger than your actual value, whether the room thinks you are better than you are, whether the success in your name was really earned by the person whose name is on it. The condition was identified in 1978 by two psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, working with high-achieving women who could not internalise their own competence. They called it the imposter phenomenon, the press called it imposter syndrome, and the name stuck. Nearly fifty years of research has followed. The cure was evidence: you collected the testimony, the outcomes, the record, and you confronted the distortion with what was true, and over time the perception adjusted.
What happens when you add AI to that picture is structurally different. When you have a thought partner that is not human, the question of perceived value against actual value changes shape. The actual value is no longer cleanly yours, and the old gap between what the room thinks of you and what you privately know is replaced by a different gap, between what you produced and what you actually thought. The first gap could be closed with evidence. The second cannot, because the evidence itself is the source of the doubt.
That is the new imposter syndrome.
You have had this experience already. You sat down to prep for something, a thought arrived, you used AI, and it worked. Afterwards you tried to remember where it came from and you could not. Was it yours, was it the AI’s, was it some borrowed shape of a thought you had read in a newsletter last week?
I had it last week prepping for a podcast on AI and education, one of the conversations I am doing to push the book. I was building an argument about sixteen to eighteen year olds and where their schooling needs to go, and I kept building it, and the recording was coming, and the question came. Was the argument mine, or was it from a Claude conversation in March, or a Google search at breakfast, or a podcast on my walk? Some blend of all of it, fused over weeks, surfacing in my head as if it were a single clean thought belonging to a single clean person.
The old imposter syndrome would have asked whether the idea was good. The new one asks whose it is.
To understand it properly, you need to look at what AI is actually doing inside human cognition, not just around it.
Before AI, thinking gave us the illusion of stages. You had an idea, you sat with it, you tested it, you shaped it into a sentence. The thought had always been shaped by books, conversations, teachers, and culture, and everyone knew that. But the process felt slow enough, and private enough, for the thinker to experience it as their own.
With AI in the loop, those stages collapse into a single interaction. You half-have a thought, you type it almost as a question to yourself, the model returns a more developed version, and you read it and recognise something true in it. The three stages of cognition merge into a single transaction that happens faster than your awareness can keep up with, and by the time you have read the output, the thinking has already happened, and you cannot reconstruct the boundary between the part you did and the part the model did.
The honest claim is not that AI makes thinking collaborative for the first time. It is that AI makes collaboration instant, intimate, fluent, and almost impossible to attribute. The architecture of thinking has not changed because cognition was suddenly social, because cognition was always social. It has changed because the loop is now so fast and so private that the social part is invisible.
In my last keynote, I said the people most exposed to AI are not the ones who use it most, but the ones who built their careers on a particular way of thinking. Even as I said it, I started to doubt where the line had come from. Was it a conversation with Claude in February, a Sam Altman interview I half-watched in March or a sentence from my own book that I had cut. I could not point to the moment I first thought it, and the line was already said.
The closest metaphor is autocorrect. Not an external editor you consult and then accept or reject, but an autocorrect, which means by the time you notice it has happened, it is already in your sentence.
The condition has three distinct forms, and they are not the same experience. The old vocabulary cannot distinguish between them. Calling all three imposter syndrome is like calling every chest pain a heart attack, and the treatment depends on the form.
Phantom Authorship is the feeling that what you produced is not fully yours. The output is in your name, colleagues credit you, the work is real, and still, in private, you cannot locate yourself in it. Like a phantom limb, the authorship is present without being there. This is the form most senior professionals experience, where the work continues to be excellent and the doubt is invisible to everyone except the person carrying it.
Velocity Vertigo is the feeling of operating beyond your real skill level because the tool is moving you faster than you can build judgement to match. Junior professionals get this most acutely. The output is impressive, the skill underneath has not yet been built, and you are producing work that would have taken a senior person twenty years to learn when you have been in the job for two. The room treats you as competent, and you feel the speed and you feel the void.
The Hollowing is the deepest form, an identity-level doubt rather than a project-level one. It is the feeling that you cannot find where you end and the tool begins. This shows up in people who built their identity around their craft, the writers and strategists and designers, anyone whose self was their thinking. The other two forms are about specific output, but the Hollowing is about not being able to point at yourself any more.
People experiencing the new imposter syndrome are carrying one of these, or some combination of all three and I bet you feel some of this.
For the old imposter syndrome, the cure was internal. You changed how you saw yourself.
For the new one, internal work will not be enough. You cannot convince yourself a sentence is yours when in some real sense it is not. The honest answer is that thinking has become a thing two parties do together, and trying to reclaim it as an individual possession is not therapy but denial.
What you can recover is a different role. You are no longer the sole generator. You are the editor, the curator, the director of the work, and the judgement of what is good, what is true, what is worth saying, becomes the new locus of human value. That recognition is built over time. It cannot be prompted, it does not appear in the output of the model, and it is the thing the model is using when it is being used well.
In practice it is four questions. Do I believe this? Can I defend it without the model? Would I still say it if my name were attached? What did the model add that I could not have produced alone? The fourth question is the hardest, because the honest answer is often that the model added the bit that made it travel, and that is fine. The judgement about whether the bit that made it travel is true was yours.
I recently had three coaching sessions with a finance professional who came to me for help in seeking a new role. I’m not a career coach per se, but I can help! He had the substrate, twenty years in the industry, and the actual material and experience was there. What he did not have was confidence in his own voice when telling it. He started using voice mode on Claude and on ChatGPT, flipping between them, talking through real stories from his career and letting the models coach him on how he was telling them, not generating the stories but sharpening the telling. He left with interview answers that were entirely his and slightly better articulated. He got a role, and when he called to tell me, he was not ecstatic about the job, he was ecstatic about the skill. He had stopped trying to use AI to think for him and started using it to sharpen what he already thought.
Here is the harder prediction, though. I reckon that the new imposter syndrome will fade, not because anyone solves it, but because people will stop noticing it.
That is how every major augmentation of human capability has resolved. The printing press created a generation that worried it was no longer obliged to remember, and within a century, knowing where to find a thing counted as knowing the thing. The calculator created a generation that wondered if it could still do arithmetic. The internet created a generation that questioned whether it was thinking or just retrieving. The questions did not vanish, but they lost their cultural charge.
Each transition followed the same shape of pain, public examination, and forgetting. The augmented self becomes the normal self, the category that an older generation used to distinguish authentic from augmented quietly stops being used, and there is no ceremony, just a settling that happens in the background.
The new imposter syndrome is in the early part of that arc. We are in the pain phase, and the public examination is happening now, in essays like this one and in conversations people are starting to have about what they did and did not write. The forgetting is coming. Within a generation, the question of whose thought it is will be as quaint as asking whose handwriting it is on a typed document.
That is a relief, and it is also why this examination has to happen now. Once the pain goes, the change has been completed without ever having been publicly examined, and our children will inherit a model of thinking that we adopted under duress and never seriously interrogated. The first generation that grew up with AI in their schooling is now arriving, their thinking has been scaffolded since they were ten, and they will not have the new imposter syndrome the way we do. They will also not know that it was a thing to have.
This is why the naming matters now. After the forgetting, there is no naming.
The most valuable workers of the next decade will not be the ones who use AI most. They will be the ones who can hold the line between their own judgement and the model’s output even when the two have become indistinguishable in their own minds. That is a real skill, it is not natural, it will not be widespread, but it can be built, and the people who build it will be the ones who do not lose themselves in the transition.
What is real in a world where we are using the superpowers of machines? What does human really mean? Will we all become imposters?
Or maybe we are the last generation that will be able to ask.
SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI is published by Kogan Page on 3 July 2026. You can pre-order it at superskillsbook.com.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (Kogan Page, July 2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
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It feels like there is a fundamental difference here that is not called out explicitly (or even implicitly). The role of systemic discrimination and systemic bias in Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter Syndrome is not just an internal psychological phenomenon. It is rooted in the reality of working and living in a culture (social culture, family culture, business culture, educational culture, and so on) that is steeped in racism, sexism, and/or classism (to name just three). These environments continuously signal to some of us (but not all of us) that we do not belong. It can be overt or subtle (or both, cycling back and forth) and it leads to the internalization of the biases which then make us question our own qualifications and worthiness. Things like microaggressions, stereotypes, a lack of representation, scarcity of mentors, and poorly matched evaluation criteria can also contribute to Imposter Syndrome.
I think phenomena that you have described above is compelling and deserves contemplation, however I don't see it as rooted in systemic cultural biases that the individual internalizes and then uses to judge their own self worth. The phenomena that you describe feels like it is more about an internal and individual loss (or loosening) of the sense of self. When we collaborate with other living humans, we often don't know whose original idea (or words or initial design) something was, because, hopefully, we built it together, we learned from each other, we riffed off each other, we inspired each other to find new and better (hopefully better) ways of describing, designing, creating, and executing. Maybe, when we work with an AI, especially when we work solo with an AI, we fundamentally don't think of it as a "collaboration." Rather, we think if it as something we created on our own while using a tool. However, the end result certainly doesn't feel (or look or sound) like something we did on our own. It doesn't really have our own unique voice, it doesn't follow the solo creation process that we have grown accustomed to, so it leaves us wonder what part of it is actually ours. I think figuring out how to work in this way will take each of us time and will look and feel different for each of us, however I don't think it is that similar to the process of navigating Imposter Syndrome.
Interesting! I tend to agree with you that the "new" imposter syndrome will fade. Sadly, I don't think the old imposter syndrome will fade. People's internal beliefs about their own value can be some of the most vulnerable and hard-to-change beliefs that we have.