Authenticity and Writing With Artificial Intelligence
Writing with AI is fast and often as good or better than our own writing.
Give the AI a guide trained on your preferences, and it can even match your voice, diction, and style. The efficiency of writing with AI certainly makes it hugely attractive to anyone who creates words for others to consume.
But readers of those words will become increasingly concerned with their authenticity. When others know an artificial intelligence is used to compose your words, readers will naturally question the sincerity, authenticity, and originality of that writing.
Consider the example of heartfelt notes sent after a critical episode in life. If a leader sent you a note of sympathy, congratulations, a thank you, or a simple message of encouragement and you knew it was generated by an AI tool, would you feel it was as sincere and genuine as words you knew were penned without any help?
As AI tools diffuse and become commonplace, people will increasingly evaluate the true authorship of some messages.
Using AI to compose or assist in writing emails, policy statements, instructions, and presentation decks (among many other everyday messages) will save time and improve quality. Everyone will be expected to do so without any criticism.
But more personal messages, such as blog posts, personal letters, heartfelt expressions, advice, and requests for assistance (among many other symbolic messages) will be scrutinized and treated harshly if and when AI is used to create them. Not by everyone, of course, but by those who think that authenticity matters. Which will be a sizeable audience.
People will soon increasingly seek out music, art, novels, and other forms of creative expression that originate directly from artists and that do not use AI.
As the AI tools continue to advance and develop reasoning skills, it will be difficult to distinguish what is human and what is AI-created. This will push writers, artists, and other creators to label their work as AI-assisted or not.
While no one has a crystal ball to predict exactly how this will play out in the future, we can be certain that some people will value authenticity in a way that makes the ground rules of using AI more complicated than what it is currently.
What we do know is that sincerity and authenticity cannot be delegated to any intelligence other than your own.
Field Notes does not rely on AI for writing or editing. By design and choice. The words, as imperfect as they are, come from real people with deep experience. AI would make the task of writing them every day much easier, but the authenticity of the content would be lost in the process.
Before you jump to use an AI tool to compose a message, ask yourself how important it is for your true voice to take center stage.
Here's a good rule: If you would feel embarrassed or awkward if others were to learn you used AI to create a message, then you should avoid using it.
Distinguishing when and when not to incorporate AI will soon be its own skill.
These sentences from your post are filled with great meaning and promise: "Field Notes does not rely on AI for writing or editing. By design and choice. The words, as imperfect as they are, come from real people with deep experience." Thank you.
Writing with AI can be helpful as a guide or for sketching out how you could potentially write something, but it should not be used in the final piece. AI could easily replace so many things in life, and likely will, but humans will still want authentic and meaningful writing to them. AI is a tool, not a human, and it can never replicate the true sincerity and emotional connections that we’re able to experience in our relationships.