Generative AI is forcing people to rethink what it means to be authentic

It seems that pop stars Drake and The Weeknd didn’t suddenly drop a brand new track that went viral on TikTok and YouTube in April 2023. The photograph that won a global photography competition that very same month wasn’t an actual photograph. And the image of Pope Francis sporting a Balenciaga jacket that appeared in March 2023? That was also a fake.

All were made with the assistance of generative AI, the brand new technology that may generate humanlike text, audio and pictures on demand through programs resembling ChatGPT, Midjourney and Bard, amongst others.

There’s actually something unsettling concerning the ease with which individuals could be duped by these fakes, and I see it as a harbinger of an authenticity crisis that raises some difficult questions.

How will voters know whether a video of a politician saying something offensive was real or generated by AI? Will people be willing to pay artists for his or her work when AI can create something visually stunning? Why follow certain authors when stories of their writing style might be freely circulating on the web?

I’ve been seeing the anxiety play out throughout me at Stanford University, where I’m a professor and likewise lead a big generative AI and education initiative.

With text, image, audio and video all becoming easier for anyone to supply through recent generative AI tools, I consider individuals are going to wish to reexamine and recalibrate how authenticity is judged in the primary place.

Fortunately, social science offers some guidance.

The many faces of authenticity

Long before generative AI and ChatGPT rose to the fore, people had been probing what makes something feel authentic.

When an actual estate agent is gushing over a property they are attempting to sell you, are they being authentic or simply attempting to close the deal? Is that stylish acquaintance wearing authentic designer fashion or a mass-produced knock-off? As you mature, how do you discover your authentic self?

These will not be just philosophical exercises. Neuroscience research has shown that believing a chunk of art is authentic will activate the brain’s reward centers in ways in which viewing something you’ve been told is a forgery won’t.

Authenticity also matters since it is a social glue that reinforces trust. Take the social media misinformation crisis, wherein fake news has been inadvertently spread and authentic news decreed fake.

In short, authenticity matters, for each individuals and society as an entire.

But what actually makes something feel authentic?

Psychologist George Newman has explored this query in a series of studies. He found that there are three major dimensions of authenticity.

One of those is historical authenticity, or whether an object is actually from the time, place and person someone claims it to be. An actual painting made by Rembrandt would have historical authenticity; a contemporary forgery wouldn’t.

A second dimension of authenticity is the type that plays out when, say, a restaurant in Japan offers exceptional and authentic Neapolitan pizza. Their pizza was not made in Naples or imported from Italy. The chef who prepared it might not have a drop of Italian blood of their veins. But the ingredients, appearance and taste may match very well with what tourists would anticipate finding at an incredible restaurant in Naples. Newman calls that express authenticity.

And finally, there’s the authenticity that comes from our values and beliefs. This is the type that many citizens find wanting in politicians and elected leaders who say one thing but do one other. It is what admissions officers search for in college essays.

In my very own research, I’ve also seen that authenticity can relate to our expectations about what tools and activities are involved in creating things.

For example, while you see a chunk of custom furniture that claims to be handmade, you almost certainly assume that it wasn’t literally made by hand – that every one styles of modern tools were nonetheless used to chop, shape and fasten each bit. Similarly, if an architect uses computer software to assist draw up constructing plans, you continue to probably consider the product as legitimate and original. This is because there’s a general understanding that those tools are a part of what it takes to make those products.

In most of your quick judgments of authenticity, you don’t think much about these dimensions. But with generative AI, you have to to.

That’s because back when it took numerous time to supply original recent content, there was a general assumption that it required skill to create – that it only might have been made by expert individuals putting in numerous effort and acting with one of the best of intentions.

These will not be protected assumptions anymore.

How to take care of the looming authenticity crisis

Generative AI thrives on exploiting people’s reliance on categorical authenticity by producing material that appears like “the true thing.”

So it’ll be essential to disentangle historical and categorical authenticity in your individual pondering. Just because a recording sounds exactly like Drake – that’s, it matches the category expectations for Drake’s music – it doesn’t mean that Drake actually recorded it. The great essay that was turned in for a school writing class task may not actually be from a student laboring to craft sentences for hours on a word processor.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, everyone will need to contemplate that it might not have actually hatched from an egg.

Also, it’ll be essential for everybody to get up to the mark on what these recent generative AI tools really can and may’t do. I believe it will involve ensuring that folks study AI in schools and within the workplace, and having open conversations about how creative processes will change with AI being broadly available.

Writing papers for varsity in the longer term is not going to necessarily mean that students need to meticulously form each sentence; there are actually tools that might help them think of the way to phrase their ideas. And creating a tremendous picture won’t require exceptional hand-eye coordination or mastery of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

Finally, in a world where AI operates as a tool, society goes to have to contemplate the best way to establish guardrails. These could take the shape of regulations, or the creation of norms inside certain fields for disclosing how and when AI has been used.

Does AI get credited as a co-author on writing? Is it disallowed on certain forms of documents or for certain grade levels at school? Does entering a chunk of art into a contest require a signed statement that the artist didn’t use AI to create their submission? Or does there should be recent, separate competitions that expressly invite AI-generated work?

These questions are tricky. It could also be tempting to easily deem generative AI an unacceptable aid, in the identical way that calculators are forbidden in some math classes.

However, sequestering recent technology risks imposing arbitrary limits on human creative potential. Would the expressive power of images be what it’s now if photography had been deemed an unfair use of technology? What if Pixar movies were deemed ineligible for the Academy Awards because people thought computer animation tools undermined their authenticity?

The capabilities of generative AI have surprised many and can challenge everyone to think in a different way. But I consider humans can use AI to expand the boundaries of what is feasible and create interesting, worthwhile – and, yes, authentic – artistic endeavors, writing and design.