‘Deepfakes Are Crossing Serious Ethical Lines’

Serbjeet Sidhu is an engineer by education, a management consultant by profession and a writer by passion. His experience across international organisations, diverse cultures and relationships has shaped a broad, practical understanding of people. He has a natural knack for working with incomplete or unstructured information, ambiguity and competing choices, and hence sees writing as a natural extension of his consulting instinct. Here are the excerpts of his interaction with Shiv Sethi.

You come from an engineering and consulting background. What brought you into writing?

For me, the transition is natural. A consultant must observe, communicate, cut through clutter and make sense of situations where the full picture is rarely available. Engineering gave me a practical, logical outlook; consulting taught me to question, structure and communicate. Writing is an extension of that. The audience may be different, but the principle is the same: understand what is happening, view it from different angles and communicate it clearly.

Your books range from relationships to AI, leadership and satire. Are they not disconnected in theme?

Certainly not. I never decide that today I will write fiction, satire or business. An idea usually begins with something I observe in everyday life or work. Even my fiction is rarely fiction at the root; the seed is real. Only One grew from thoughts I first had while preparing for my NDA interview, where choices and collateral consequences were part of the mindset. Patong Can Wait is satire, but it comes from observing real social behaviour. I write what feels worth expressing, not what is trending.

Choices and moral ambiguity appear repeatedly in your work. Why do they interest you so much?

It is probably the management consultant in me; choices are my food for thought. In life, there is often no single correct choice. Choices are rarely as simple as right versus wrong. They are more often between responsibilities, loyalties, people, outcomes or circumstances, each carrying consequences. This is especially interesting to me when viewed through the lens of change enablement.

AI features prominently in your recent work. What worries you most about its impact?

Three things. First, AI hype can make it look like a one-stop route to a high-paying job, when it is fundamentally an enabling tool. Second, overdependence may weaken problem-solving, judgement, ethics and other core skills. Third, deepfakes are already crossing serious ethical lines and are often defended as humour even when they put false words or actions onto real people. My fear is not that AI becomes intelligent; my fear is that AI may never become ethical. We should not outsource thinking simply because an answer is always available.

What should young people understand about careers in the AI era?

Never confuse mastery of a tool with mastery of a profession. Build a strong foundation first - engineering, finance, marketing, or whatever your field - and then use AI to become better at it. Human judgement, communication, relationships, curiosity and ethics still matter.

You have written about leadership and what has gone wrong in modern journalism. Do you see a common thread?

Certainly. The common thread is what organisations say they value and what they actually reward. If a company says it values trust and people development but rewards only the bottom line, behaviour will follow the bottom line. The same applies to media. If promotions are driven mainly by clicks, TRPs and outrage, ethics take a back seat. I see both as performance-management problems. Values cannot live only on posters; they must appear in how performance is measured and rewarded. Walking the talk is not a slogan; it is a system.

Do you write to give readers answers, or to make them question their own choices?

I cannot answer on the reader's behalf. I write to make people think and discover their own answers. This comes from my consulting instinct: I do not tell a client, 'This is your answer.' I lay out options, consequences and trade-offs, and the client decides. With readers, I do something similar. I am a facilitator: I show different ways of looking at something and let readers discover their own answers.

What would you like readers to remember about you after reading your work?

I would like to leave a mark where, in some way, I remain Gone and Ungone. Gone because, like everyone else, one day I will no longer be here. Ungone because my words may remain. I write to express what I have seen, what I believe and what I think might help someone facing a situation I once faced. Books stay. If something I have written makes someone think, question or see a situation differently years from now, that is enough for me.