A Refuge of Authenticity

Cultivating places of authenticity in an inauthentic world

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

Welcome to the age of disorientation.

Step into the 2023 digital world and almost nothing you see, hear, or read should be assumed to be real anymore. Not that anything digital was ever really “real” in the sense of physical, created matter - for that you would have to turn off the screen and go outside and listen to the birds or something. Bird song. Grass. Trees. Cool autumn air. A human companion. These things are “real” in a way the virtual or the digital can never be, no matter how hard Silicon Valley’s metaverse may try. But the virtual world has done the seemingly impossible in the last few years - make itself more unreal and more virtual than it already was. Before 2020, pretty much every image you saw, article you read, and every soundbite you listened to was created by a real human somewhere on this planet. It was human creativity as mediated through the machine - a second best, perhaps, but still the output of “humanness”.

But everything has changed.

Now, every image you see, every sound you hear, and every article you read in this virtual world has to be questioned. Is this real? Is this the output of a physical human’s creativity? Does this beautiful mountain really exist? Has this song really been sung? Are these the perfectly written thoughts of a writer? Or are these all the products of the machine gone wild? Who can really know…

Welcome to the age of inauthenticity.

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Artificial “intelligence” has forced a paradigmatic shift in the virtual ecosystem, no habitat in the digital creative realm is free from its invasive influence. Nothing can be assumed to be true any longer - its authenticity must be questioned. Questioning everything takes up a lot of brain capacity. It is exhausting, it is disorientating - and this is now our life. Ever-increasingly, the domain of the real and the authentic is ceding territory to the rampant “progress” of the artificial. More and more images are going to be fake - portraying events and moments that never happened. And more and more essays and articles are going to be the perfectly-prosed paragraphs of the machine - regurgitated and synthesised thoughts and information that once originated from real people. Human creativity is fast approaching being made redundant - at least in the eyes of those who are content with unoriginal, second-best productions from the machine.

“No point hiding or retreating” shout the techno-modernists, “AI is here to stay.”

“This is your life now, embrace the machine and all will be well!”

Liars, the lot of them.

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