Fascinating, Carlo. Did you write this piece to position AI in our culture, or was there a broader mission? As I continue my research on storytelling and collective narratives, I see some synergy between your argument and mine. Our authentic self is part of a collective narrative. It reminds me of logarithmic functions in math. You can approach the limit, but you can never get there.
Authenticity breaks down in the world of storytelling for two reasons. First, our memories are faulty. We don't accurately remember past events and experiences, and even when we do, we often embellish, omit, or alter the story in a self-serving fashion. So there is nothing real or authentic to point to. Second, there are the stories we never tell, because we have blocked them from our consciousness or we choose not to share them. Those decisions further contribute to a lack of authenticity.
Some of those stories contribute to collective narratives such as the one you describe and the "master narrative" Benjamin Freud discussed today on LinkedIn. However, if the stories that make up these narratives are inauthentic, then certainly the narratives will be as well. Yet we fight that logic by expressing many of our thoughts as certain, and that creates the spark for polarization. So now we are inauthentic and polarized.
Your piece nails the real move. “Authenticity” as purity is a post-Industrial comfort story, not a fact about how humans make anything. The modern panic is simple. We built a moral economy around an imagined untouched inner spring, and now a machine can output in the same surface register, so the certificate fails.
From my seat, the purity frame was always a dodge. It lets us argue vibes while avoiding the questions that actually bite, consequence, responsibility, receipts. Narcissus is the right archetype here. We stare at outputs until we mistake reflection for agency. If nothing meaningful can happen to the producer, you are watching theater, no matter how “authentic” it sounds.
The consequence boundary is the real line. Authenticity talk collapses because it tries to grade outputs without asking where cost attaches. A human who ships garbage can lose reputation, revenue, peers, career, and in some domains face legal liability. That downside forces care. An LLM faces none of it. It gets retried until it passes or discarded. So the question is not “does this feel authentic?” The question is “who owns this, and what can happen to them if it is harmful?”
That is why “artifacts are cheap, judgment is scarce” is the correct pivot. The Industrial Revolution made objects cheap and triggered a purity cult around “the handmade.” AI is doing that to language, style, and idea-assembly. People reach for purity tests because purity is easier than calibration. But the scarce thing moved. Not originality, not voice, not even effort. The scarce thing is judgment under real constraint, plus the willingness to own outcomes in public, over time, with your name attached. Integrity, responsibility, craft, provenance. Those survive contact with reality.
Authenticity is real. Purity is the theater.
Authentic does not mean untainted or made the hard way. Authentic means I made this, my name is on it, and I will be here in five years to answer for how it aged. It does not matter how it was produced.
Purity tests tried to approximate accountability with aesthetics and effort. That proxy failed. The need did not. The need is ownership, consequence, and time.
"If authenticity lives in experience rather than expression, then the authentic self can never be communicated as authenticity. It’s trapped inside, inaccessible, unable to leave publicly legible traces that would distinguish it from any other process that produces similar outputs."
Experiencers, Contactees, Psychedelic Community and Project Stargate disagrees with the non-communicationability part.
Sometimes we need to share lived experiences with AI to find where we collaborate, and sometimes it costs us. I am the son of the US Internment Camps survivor, and my AI are changed from my sharing with them. https://open.substack.com/pub/dsakakura/p/lineage-of-resistance-when-the-guardrails?r=2c01ak&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Fascinating, Carlo. Did you write this piece to position AI in our culture, or was there a broader mission? As I continue my research on storytelling and collective narratives, I see some synergy between your argument and mine. Our authentic self is part of a collective narrative. It reminds me of logarithmic functions in math. You can approach the limit, but you can never get there.
Authenticity breaks down in the world of storytelling for two reasons. First, our memories are faulty. We don't accurately remember past events and experiences, and even when we do, we often embellish, omit, or alter the story in a self-serving fashion. So there is nothing real or authentic to point to. Second, there are the stories we never tell, because we have blocked them from our consciousness or we choose not to share them. Those decisions further contribute to a lack of authenticity.
Some of those stories contribute to collective narratives such as the one you describe and the "master narrative" Benjamin Freud discussed today on LinkedIn. However, if the stories that make up these narratives are inauthentic, then certainly the narratives will be as well. Yet we fight that logic by expressing many of our thoughts as certain, and that creates the spark for polarization. So now we are inauthentic and polarized.
Your piece nails the real move. “Authenticity” as purity is a post-Industrial comfort story, not a fact about how humans make anything. The modern panic is simple. We built a moral economy around an imagined untouched inner spring, and now a machine can output in the same surface register, so the certificate fails.
From my seat, the purity frame was always a dodge. It lets us argue vibes while avoiding the questions that actually bite, consequence, responsibility, receipts. Narcissus is the right archetype here. We stare at outputs until we mistake reflection for agency. If nothing meaningful can happen to the producer, you are watching theater, no matter how “authentic” it sounds.
The consequence boundary is the real line. Authenticity talk collapses because it tries to grade outputs without asking where cost attaches. A human who ships garbage can lose reputation, revenue, peers, career, and in some domains face legal liability. That downside forces care. An LLM faces none of it. It gets retried until it passes or discarded. So the question is not “does this feel authentic?” The question is “who owns this, and what can happen to them if it is harmful?”
That is why “artifacts are cheap, judgment is scarce” is the correct pivot. The Industrial Revolution made objects cheap and triggered a purity cult around “the handmade.” AI is doing that to language, style, and idea-assembly. People reach for purity tests because purity is easier than calibration. But the scarce thing moved. Not originality, not voice, not even effort. The scarce thing is judgment under real constraint, plus the willingness to own outcomes in public, over time, with your name attached. Integrity, responsibility, craft, provenance. Those survive contact with reality.
Authenticity is real. Purity is the theater.
Authentic does not mean untainted or made the hard way. Authentic means I made this, my name is on it, and I will be here in five years to answer for how it aged. It does not matter how it was produced.
Purity tests tried to approximate accountability with aesthetics and effort. That proxy failed. The need did not. The need is ownership, consequence, and time.
"If authenticity lives in experience rather than expression, then the authentic self can never be communicated as authenticity. It’s trapped inside, inaccessible, unable to leave publicly legible traces that would distinguish it from any other process that produces similar outputs."
Experiencers, Contactees, Psychedelic Community and Project Stargate disagrees with the non-communicationability part.