Is AI the Latest Version of Makeup?

As a man, I may not be the right person to speak about this, but it feels like AI may just be the latest version of makeup and/or plastic surgery.

Hear me out.

There’s a wide spectrum of how people want to present themselves. Some people want to go completely natural with no makeup. Some people love makeup. Other people want to change their appearance even more permanently by dyeing their hair or getting plastic surgery.

I don't think many of us see this as a moral issue. These are personal preferences about how people want to look a certain way. It might give them a sense of confidence or comfort. It might be their way of saying, "This is how I want to present and represent myself."

I wonder if AI is really all that different.

Many of us have thrown out moral claims about the use of AI. If you use AI, you're being inauthentic. You're not being yourself. You're lying to your audience.

That might be an overly simplistic argument.

Take me as an example. I have horrible grammar and spelling, so I use AI to clean that up and help me present as more professional. I don't want it changing my ideas or making me sound like someone else, but I don’t want a bunch of typos in this blog (EDITOR’S NOTE: Neither do I do, Dan.).

Maybe I’m using AI like how I’d imagine a woman to use mascara. (EDITOR’S NOTE: You guys should’ve seen the first makeup analogy Dan came up with.) Other people may want to use AI to dramatically change the way they're perceived. They may want to sound more intelligent, professional, funnier, thoughtful, whatever. Maybe that's more like plastic surgery on the other end.

But I'm not sure that's automatically inauthentic. Someone may alter their appearance significantly, and we don't necessarily say they're being inauthentic. That's how they've chosen to show up in the world. We may have opinions about that choice, but I don't know that I'd say the person is lying because they've changed how they present themselves.

So, why do we jump there so quickly with AI?

My Definition of Authenticity and Transparency

We're throwing around words like "authenticity" and "transparency" as if we've all agreed on what they mean, but we haven’t.

Even outside of AI, authenticity can mean a lot of different things. Some people might look at someone wearing a lot of makeup and say, "That's not what you look like. That's inauthentic." Someone else may look at the exact same person and say they're being completely authentic because that's how they've chosen to express themselves.  

For me, being authentic is something like being original, personal, the real you. But even as I type that, I realize "the real you" leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

Maybe I need to be comfortable with that. If I'm willing to give people space to decide how they want to present themselves in real life, even when their choices might feel inauthentic to me, shouldn't I give them some of that same space when they're using AI?

That's hard for me, though. Someone else may decide that a thoroughly AI-created version of themselves is how they want to show up. That would feel inauthentic to me. But I'm not sure I should get to make that decision for them.

When AI-Written Copy Deceives Us

If I read enough of your articles, listen to your podcasts, watch your interviews or follow your posts, I start to feel like I understand something about you. I understand how you think. What you care about. Your sense of humor. Maybe I even start thinking, "I bet we'd have a really interesting conversation if we got together."

Thought leadership and personal content help create connection, but what happens  if I find out that the person I thought I was connecting with wasn't really the person creating any of it?

That's where the word “deceived” becomes important.

If AI cleaned up your grammar, I don't feel deceived. If it helped you organize some thoughts, I don't feel deceived. But if AI is doing most of your thinking, writing, humor and storytelling? Yeah, I would feel deceived. And disappointed because even though the content itself didn't change, my understanding of where it came from did.

Is Disclosure the Answer?

We don't have a great way to decipher how much AI altered content we're consuming, so instead, we make the conversation black and white. Either you typed every word yourself or you "used AI."

But "AI helped me create this" doesn't really tell me anything.

Did AI spell-check it? Did you spend 13 hours going back and forth with AI, challenging ideas, rewriting sections, adding your own experiences and eventually producing something that represents what you think? Or did you type "write me an article about AI and authenticity," copy what came back and put your name on it?

Those are dramatically different uses of AI, but our current language treats them basically the same.

I'm curious what you think about this. What does appropriate AI usage look like to you? What would you want someone to disclose? And most important, who is already having thoughtful conversations about this that I should be paying attention to?

I don't have this all figured out. But I do think "AI is authentic" versus "AI is inauthentic" is probably the least interesting version of the conversation.