Like many people of average age, I am on Facebook not so much because I want to be it, but because it is essential to follow the minutees of daily life in my circle of friends and family. Facebook gives me an ambient conscience of what is happening in the life of people I do not see very often: the sporting achievements of their children, which have been accepted in colleges, birthdays and other milestones and, because today, the death of parents and sometimes friends.
Facebook let me know the other day that a friend’s elderly mother died after a long illness. I scrolled towards the comments to leave my emoji “care” and a note of sympathy, then I noticed that Facebook had added a new feature: he proposed to write a note of sympathy in my name, giving me some useful checks. I could click to make sure that my sympathy note was “sincere”, or I could risk going there alone and having my grammar and my spelling checked.
This new feature – in AI assisted mourning – was not exactly a surprise. Like many technology giants, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) has invested massively in artificial intelligence, producing the Lama open-source model, a useful technology that underpins a lot of research in the field of generative AI, technology behind chatbots. Determined to cause an AI age, Meta pushed AI on users at every moment possible, inviting me to use its image generation software to imagine humans and penguins. He often annens my friends’ messages in a way that does not know of charm. When a friend made a joke that his schedule was excited here in the snowy Western Massachusets because he has to shovel his aisle every two hours, the meta-ai sounded with a serious offer to explain why having a clear alley was so important.
This particular intrusion by Meta Ai seems to be against a broader societal change. At a time when AI attracts enormous commercial attention, we see a powerful cultural and political push for authenticity. Earlier this year, before Trump began to exile migrants to Goulags in Salvador, before his insane world trade war, before declaring war against American universities and held students for exercising their right to protest, I contacted a friend, an initiate of the Democratic Party, to ask: “Why is Democratic politicians not talking?” Deeply tangled in the autopsy of his party during the 2024 elections, my friend admitted to me: “We no longer know how to speak to voters. Whatever we say, they don’t think we are sincere. In one way or another, the other side understood how to be authentic and we did not do it. ”
Authenticity seems to be a useful explanation for the changing media landscape, at least in American politics. Donald Trump won the 2024 elections in part by mobilizing voters with low propensity, young men in particular, who tend not to be involved in the elections. He has reached many of these voters through unusual media channels: long podcasts by influencers like Joe Rogan, whose brand is that of an authentic, relaxed and relaxed casual cat.
These podcasts may seem excruciating to those who do not know the form. Their hosts wandered for hours, and the conversation seems less designed as a perceptive interview and more like background noise. As an auditor, you are invited to spend time with your digital friends, rather than being informed as you would by a television news or a documentary. These podcasts create a parasocial link, a feeling that you personally know the people you drag practically and that you look at the world in a similar way.
We can trace the power of this form of digital co-presentation with cowled locking. Live broadcast was a common practice on the Internet before that, but largely in the video game community, where services such as Twitch allowed viewers, many of whom, to spend time with influencers while they were playing video games and broadcast their progress. During the pandemic, when many forms of socialization in person were cut, there is evidence that the forms of diffusion through podcasts, live distribution and short video such as Tiktok and YouTube saw a strong increase. My laboratory, which studies YouTube and Tiktok, observes a peak in the use of Tiktok as the pandemic took place. It seems likely that, faced with a time far from work or school, faced with loneliness or isolation, we have gotten into the habit of sharing parts of our online life with anyone would look.
The personal expression not polite during the pandemic was probably a valve of emotional liberation useful for millions of people who engage with it. Influencers like Rogan have raised this expression to an art form, not to mention a powerful trade force. In 2020, Spotify would have paid up to 200 million dollars to acquire exclusive accommodation rights on the Rogan podcast. When Rogan renewed the agreement in 2024, he obtained an additional $ 250 million as well as the diffusion rights on other platforms. Thousands of other influencers have copied its formula to talk about the cuff and apparently the heart. The length of the shape seems to promote authenticity. After all, who could be carefully scripted for so long periods? For at least certain audiences, this ability to see someone carrying out authenticity is satisfactory in a way that carefully scripted and packaged entertainment is not.
But authenticity is a complicated thing. As Talk-Show animator Joe Franklin said, “The key to success is sincerity. Once you can simulate this, you did.” Speaking on a podcast for several hours a day, Rogan could well share his authentic opinions on the world, but he is also very professional and performer.
One of the tips for appearing authentic can be particularly harmful to society as a whole. On some online platforms, it is common for content creators – figures such as Andrew Tate – to express misogynist and hateful views. This can be part of the performance of authenticity. After all, what better way to convince an audience that you are sincere than to get started? If the speaker was not sincere, why would he admit being misogynist?
My friend The Democratic initiate is concerned that not only centist and leftist politicians have not learned to communicate authenticity, but also that the priorities of the American left are read as the signaling of non -sincere virtue, rather than concerning and committed. The resistance management, he said to me, is unlikely to come from established politicians, but from someone on the left who finds how to speak authentically about their fears, values and priorities.
Where does this leave the AI industry of several billion dollars? Grindr, the gay dating platform, tests a winger AI designed to help you sail in the first clumsy conversations on a dating application. I imagine that discovering that someone used AI to discuss you could be a serious red flag. But given that many users turn to AI as advisers and companions, perhaps what I feel is my own middle age culture shock: I find it difficult to see this text generated by AI like everything except little sincere by definition.
There may be a market for high quality performance by authenticity by machines. Or maybe Meta and her fellow men are just wrong. People can be delighted to use AI to write the IT code faster. But I hope there is a misstep to make the AI tell your friend that you are sorry for the death of their mother.
While AI integrates more deep into our society, we need a conversation on authenticity in culture, technology and politics. We can say that the 2024 American presidential election was won by someone with terrible ideas sincerely. But he did a better job persuading the voters of his authenticity than the candidate with smarter ideas that gave the voters the impression that she was a scripted and polished politician. If the performance of authenticity is a shortcut towards success and power, we need a way to understand what we really have to consider as authentic. Because if we cannot communicate authenticity ourselves, companies such that Meta will try to make sure that the machines do it for us.
