Somebody asked – I think it was on LinkedIn – about the authenticity of writing in this age where AI gobblygook is becoming ubiquitous on the Internet. Toss a LLM something and it will likely tell you how to do it better, without the imagined smug look we might associate with an human editor.

I don’t know that I’ve read much authentic ever. All of these words we use were handed down to us, we rarely make new ones and when we do some don’t last. If you can’t think of one, it didn’t last. How we merge these words together is more taught than imagined, and while some may have suffered all manner of training in language, what reinforces how we communicate is how we read.

We’ve been reading Search Engine Optimized (SEO) content for at least 2 decades. SEO content was designed for search engines. So now we have a few generations who have consumed writing – for those that still read – have had their writing influenced by de facto marketing content. Blech.

Where once as a teenager I read The Hobbit and the entire Trilogy of Lord of the Rings in under a week (homework be damned!), a teenager now may not be able to sit through just one of the 3 hour movies. I’m not saying this is good or bad. It is. How we interpret that seems to have a lot to do with what sort of content we consume, and how short our attention span is.

Where once we ate big meals of data at one sitting, we’re eating smaller meals of data throughout the day, like birds. When I interact with people outside of these flat screens, I wonder how authentic communication happens at all.

Tweets, Twitter, Twits. And yet recently, I found people who are supposed to be pretty soaked in technology unable to figure out their email, and having volunteer board meetings that were 3 hours long and minuted by everyone grabbing their crayons 3 weeks after and editing what someone wrote down during the meeting, and in the meeting I felt like I had earned at least 2 MBAs by hearing them regurgitate textbooks. Maybe they were audiobooks. Maybe they heard it on TikTok. Maybe it was because they were visiting websites that liked to sound official and impressive yet lacked substance.

So ask me again about how AI is affecting authenticity? We haven’t been very authentic in our communications ourselves in the past decades, and the training data was… scraped off the Internet… so that effectively everyone communicates with implicit marketing for search engines.

Effectively recycled commercials. Like Quagmire in Family Guy.

For better or worse, nobody will really notice.

Authenticity? An authentic writing voice, I think, would be a good thing. But authenticity in writing is rare, and almost always a combination of influences…

So writing in the age of AI authentically probably means not writing like AI, though these days because authenticity is so rare, an AI can write better than most people ‘authentically’.

But not all people.