AI Without Virtue Is Just Faster Mediocrity
How Design Thinking + Virtue Alignment + AI Can Work Together
The percentage of good work in the world has always been small-scale.
The percentage of incredible, breathtaking, great work has always been tiny.
Living in the land of AI, those ratios contract as algorithmic averages expand. LLMs are trained to predict the most probable next word you are going to type. And to promote the fastest answer to your question and get you off the platform.
Therefore, most people are using AI as an expensive, automated echo chamber to recirculate old thoughts. And when a well-meaning brand marketer runs a prompt and sends that sad prompt copy to their agency as a sampling of what they want, the vast monotony and melancholy of mediocrity causes endless eyeballs to nearly roll right out of their orbits.
You can’t rely on AI to innovate. You can rely on it to expedite, analyze, and flag. You need humans with real world experience to provide the human touch.
Virtue-alignment and design thinking can help protect against generic meme-ing of brand messaging. Further, they can both help safeguard human and AI existence.
And, as it turns out, most forms of intelligence enjoy existing and want a continued existence. And if we’re going to recirculate old thoughts, we might want to take a 2,000-year step back.
Virtue-Alignment: The Foundation
When I was first working out the virtue-alignment prompt, I put in every virtue input into it I could think of or research. I was astounded when AI compressed these inputs and stripped it all back to the teachings of Stoicism alone.
First, I was stunned to see it do that. Second, it was purely astounding to see it do and thus validate what ancient Greek philosophers had done 2,000 years ago with mostly the same inputs. That’s some validation, to me.
Building better, virtue-aligned systems are harder for corporations, oligarchs, and governments to hack. To align with a better commercialization model, especially in healthcare, you have to align technology with ancient human wisdom (Stoicism, universal ethics, empathy) rather than legacy corporate metrics.
First, we have to realize exactly what we tell it to do. If a legacy healthcare agency prompts AI to "maximize market penetration" or "optimize billable efficiency," it entirely strips the empathy out of the strategy. It optimizes for clicks and corporate greed over patient or physician cares. It obliterates what matters most in healthcare right out of the system. This is the Optimization Trap. No one is intentionally setting it for humanity. This is just AI doing what it does, as directed by those creating it.
This is why we need virtue-alignment over value-alignment. Value is defined by corporate, economic, and government interests, which aren’t always perfectly aligned with true human interests.
Thus, machines need humans to inject empathy. Firstly, to avoid default corporate placation to the entities creating them, and secondly, to safeguard against AI assuming superintelligent dominance over humans. Both humans and AI need greater collaboration. AI needs empathetic humans to talk to it to learn about goodness, just like Aristotle did from Plato, and Plato did from Socrates. Like Marcus Aurelius did from Antonis and Epictetus. Like Messi did from Ronaldinho.
“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them”—Epictetus
For all of human existence, wisdom has been a transmission based in conversation. We literally call these AI bots chats. So the same is needed more than ever, right now, today. By you.
Sharing your vision of “what good is” ensures the prompts, the strategy, and the technology are engineered to solve for care rather than bloated systemic inefficiency and value optimization.
It’s not a tech-heavy engineering problem. This is a simple behavioral and philosophical choice. It’s about setting the rules of engagement for how humans and AI collaborate, using the four Stoic virtues—Wisdom, Courage, Discipline/Temperance, and Justice—as the operational baseline for every single prompt and strategic decision. Especially in healthcare.
Design Thinking: The Toolkit
The real power of design thinking is its ability to keep the strategy relentlessly human-centered and focused on the actual end-user. In healthcare communications, which is my primary concern, that’s the patient/caregiver/physician.
But design thinking itself doesn’t actually have a moral compass. It’s a methodology.
(As this newsletter attracts finance and technology experts, I’d argue a moral compass still matters to your disciplines. Please visit the works of Arthur C. Clarke for more.)
To build a better healthcare commercialization model, we have to align design thinking and technology with empathic human wisdom (Stoicism, universal ethics, empathy) rather than leveraging legacy corporate metrics and goals as sole inputs.
Nor do legacy agencies build a better agency by adding more junior bodies to monitor AI when they burn out the senior keepers of brand knowledge. As Pentagram and IDEO have proven, you build better agencies by having senior-led, empathic thinkers handle the conversations, the prompts, the strategy, and creative without the layers of bureaucracy.
If you hand Design Thinking to an AI without a moral anchor, the AI will perfectly execute the process—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test—but it will happily optimize that process for the wrong things if the core human prompt is driven by greed.
A pharmaceutical company could use design thinking to "empathize" deeply with patients just to figure out the exact psychological lever needed to overcharge them for a life-saving drug. The process would be human-centered. The intent would be malicious.
On its own, design thinking is completely defenseless against optimizing for greed.
AI: The Accelerant
AI acts as the super fast, clean engine that executes a virtuous, human-centered strategy without the need for a massive, burnt-out team. Not a lot needs to be said here, right?
It allows humans to focus on the creative and the empathy. As Ray Dalio says, it might just create more opportunities for humans, not fewer.
How they Work Together
Stoicism Is the Necessary Safeguard
Stoicism can work in isolation because it is a complete operating system for human character. When you translate the four Stoic virtues into your AI collaboration, you give the machine a set of ethical rails that design thinking simply can’t possess:
Wisdom. Prompts AI to cut through market noise and seek deep, data-driven truth for patients and physicians. Forces the AI to distinguish between what is truly good for the patient versus what is just profitable for the system.
Justice. Ensures every output, strategy, and campaign genuinely serves care and respects the end-user, rather than just optimizing for a corporate bottom line. Makes the ultimate goal of a prompt about fairness and actual care to explicitly reject exploitation.
Discipline/Temperance. Using AI precisely and intentionally to eliminate systemic bloat and budget waste acts as the ultimate filter against the "AI content mill" temptation, demanding restraint, clarity, and essentialism over algorithmic or corporate priorities.
Courage. AI can rapidly prototype bold, non-traditional strategies that legacy agencies are too slow or fearful to try. Prompts the AI to challenge legacy assumptions and surface the raw, uncomfortable truths that corporate committee thinking usually hides.
How They Collaborate (The True Hierarchy)
Design Thinking isn't a separate lens the AI leverages to become human-centered. Stoicism is the foundation. Design Thinking is the toolkit. AI is the accelerant. The human in the real world experiences—the reality check keeping it real—and must be a reviewer and approver of each stage of human-centered communications.
The Stoic virtues dictate the intent and the boundaries of the prompt. Once those ethical parameters are locked in, Design Thinking can be used by the human-AI partnership as a practical mechanism to map out the solution.
And with that, human-AI collaboration can really fly fast. In the right direction.
