And why do we need this drama of authenticity at all? It always baffles me how humans keep creating problems just like that.
Before looking for a solution, just stop for a second and evaluate whether we need more problems. If so, ask yourself for whom we are creating more problems?
The drama of authenticity is only a veil over the problem of trusting other people. If you cannot trust other people, why even post a comment, or for that matter contribute to society?
If you can trust people, then knowing when and how to trust them matters, and thus authenticity is a concern.
So it's about connection, and how authenticity affects it.
The author's gripe is about losing one's self to the influence of society.
Being driven, rather than doing your own driving. Following instead of leading.
And then once you're in this rut, it becomes difficult to connect with you. Trust is an issue because the reader doesn't know who is writing anymore. Hence his disclaimer at the start.
I don't know what to say though. Careful, authentic writing takes time that everyone seems to be running out of.
You have actually observed something interesting here because authenticity is how we decide who to trust. Effort and voice used to be cheap signals of a real person now llms can fake pretty much both, so I'm having to work harder to know who is on the other end.
Because authenticity matters today even more so. A simple observation, imagine this post was purely generated/optimized by llm, it wouldn't have gotten people discussing about it. Cause it's easy for smart people to quickly notice the slop and the tone. You definitely have noticed that llms don't seem to have strong opinions, it always tries to be politically correct and that's easy to spot. But having strong opinions itself isn't necessarily a sign of authenticity though. As "itsalwaysgood" put it, authenticity forces people to think through what they want to communicate so it works as a friction for good writing and drives genuine engagement. I mean who would love the idea of talking/arguing with a bot.
When I'm talking to a person irl or even chatting online I would find it very weird if the the person is always conforming to me and rarely brings up a new genuine insight or a contrary thought to add to the discussion. I'm not looking for a debate always though, sometimes just listening to someone is enough. But I hope you understand what I mean here.