Authenticity in the Age of AI

Why Authenticity Could and Should Make a Comeback

Growing up in the 80’s, I learned to think of authenticity as a moral imperative - and badge of honor. Authenticity meant ‘being true to yourself’ and ‘being real’ - but never self-promotional. Better to be a slacker than a sellout or, worst of the worst, a poser.

This appreciation of authenticity has gone out of style in the 21st century - big time. Everything is for sale. Marketing is ubiquitous. Young people conflate identity with having a personal brand. Influencers are the new celebrities, and the more sponsors they have, the more they are revered.

Selling out is no longer a vice, it is a virtue.

But change is on the horizon, and I think authenticity is primed to make a comeback.

Thanks to AI.

Don’t You (Forget About Me)

In all honesty, I don’t recall ever thinking too deeply about what being ‘authentic’ really means. The Breakfast Club, that quintessential John Hughes '80s coming-of-age film pretty much summed up the feeling of it for me: no one—not teachers, adults, or other kids—can tell you who you are because "Each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal." We get to choose, and by figuring it all out we become our best selves. Who can forget that last freezeframe shot of the movie - Judd Nelson, playing John Bender, the misunderstood punk of the crew, raising his fist in the air as he walks away, and the movie fades out to the rock anthem, "Don't You (Forget About Me)" Ah, the '80s.

That feeling carried me through my entire adolescence. Authenticity was like a north star of truthfulness that cut through the fake smiles and shameless duplicity of the world around me. Oh, yes, I was an angsty teen! The bands I loved were the ones who rejected the big record deals, and refused to become ‘the face of’ Pepsi or Chanel. I aspired to also be untainted by the commercial and the corporate, but most of all, I aspired to feel alive and to do things that mattered.

Through a Glass Darkly

As an adult in the 21st century, I never wrote off authenticity as a childish thing - but the world around me seemed to do just that. Authenticity doesn’t rank in comparison to the ruling 21st-century imperatives - the greatest of which isn’t love, but progress, productivity, and good ol’ fashioned moola. I suspect people think of authenticity as a quaint, slightly annoying holdover from a bygone era.

A maniacal focus on productivity drove authenticity from its hallowed place. I don’t think it would have happened without the digital tech revolution - the speed of things, the flood of information, the efficiency and ease of modern life, and the commensurate rise in consumption and the dopamine chase. When anything you could possibly want is always at your fingertips, being true to yourself just doesn’t seem as important, does it?

Enter AI

Now AI has entered the fray and turned up the volume to 11. In this dawn of the AI age, robots can do boring work for you, everything can be copied, everyone can flood the zone with news (or fake news), any student can effortlessly cheat, and we all have ersatz art machines at our finger tips.

Ok, there are wonderful, breathtaking medical and scientific advances, too, and as a researcher I’m giddy to see what comes next.

But the ethical challenges grow by the day. This will be a very hard needle to thread - to find the benefit amidst the risk. From human rights to creativity, we all have to watch the shop or the bad actors will have their way with the human race.

Just look at creative work. From where I stand, AI-generated art, entertainment, and writing are weirdly hollow or just plain meh. AI output counts as ‘culture’ but only as the products of an ersatz art copying machine. A recent viral example of this is the AI-generated “Ghiblification” of images to resemble Studio Ghibli-style art from the beloved animated filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. We’re glutting ourselves on AI content, but feeling starved for what makes us feel human and inspired. It seems at times, as Miyazaki put it, like “an insult to life itself.”

As a result, an appetite to get back to life, back to human, is growing. We have AI to thank for that. We can no longer ignore that our reliance on frictionless, anodyne digital living depletes and diminishes us in the end. We can no longer ignore that AI is the ultimate friction remover, allowing us to keep, as the educator and media theorist Neil Postman put it, amusing ourselves to death.

The Importance of Being Earnest

So what do we do? Let me put it in terms that every Gen-Xer like me will understand - We have to use authenticity to fight The Man (The Man being the misuse of AI). That means re-prioritizing things that might be slower or harder, but are true and nourishing and make us better humans.

For example, AI that distorts human well-being and connection, rather than amplify it, must be called out. This will be tricky, because we’ve habituated to the business model of the internet which does exactly that - highjack and monetize the human yearning for social connection and acknowledgement. It’s called social media.

We can’t let AI do the same.

It has started already, of course, with the proliferation of therapist chatbots and AI boyfriends, but we still have time to take a step back and ask - what is it about real relationships that benefit us?

It’s not the frictionless ease or bottomless wells of empathy that chatbots are so good at serving up. Those things feel nice, but the benefits of real relationships come from elsewhere. Real relationships benefit us because they allow us to give empathy as much as we receive. Relationships benefit us because it’s only in the uncomfortable struggle to understand another human being that we develop an understanding of our self.

While an AI chatbot for mental health is great at curating information, designing AI to simulate human care will fail - and risk deepening pre-existing social and emotional problems.

And here’s the thing - we need more emotional intelligence, not less. Emotional intelligence, or EI, is the ability to work with and understand emotions to achieve things in the world. It’s the bedrock of human understanding and social acumen. EI drives our intuitive ability to think outside the box, and to go to sleep with a question and wake up with the answer. It’s EI that helps us read the room, know what’s important, and do hard things. We make worse choices without EI. EI is our human genius.

As I wrote previously in an article called The Future of AI Must Be EI:

Albert Einstein wrote, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. The rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

We must remember: AI is the servant. Our authentic humanity is the gift. We honor that gift by shifting the focus to how AI can help us be more fully, gloriously human.

This age of AI is fraught with danger, but also with opportunity. Re-prioritizing authenticity can show us a way through.

Post Script

It’s strange, but when I wrote this piece I COMPLETELY ignored the countless ways in which authenticity has been appropriated by advertisers and marketers. They know that people want authentic things, so they go to great lengths to make whatever they’re selling appear to be so. In that sense, we’re swimming in signals of authenticity and it hasn’t gone out of style at all. It’s been eaten, digested, and shat out by the inexorable logic of capitalism.

This didn’t occur to me to mention in the first place because, well, it’s depressing and despicable. But there it is.