Artificial Intelligence is out there—or rather, large language models. Maybe AI will get better even in the future. What does this mean for us? How can we as humans compete with this? The answer is probably authenticity. Let me explain.
The Problem with AI-Generated Content
You’ve probably come across YouTube videos that are spoken with some monotonous voice that make strange pronunciation mistakes. These mistakes may disappear in the future, but we all know AI content when we are subjected to it.
Now, this here could look more exciting, I agree. Which is why you get the Oregon coast behind me instead of an empty wall. There’s nothing else behind me except an empty wall—that’s what you are not seeing. And I figure this is more exciting. So whenever this year is not interesting, this view might be.
But what you’ll get here is me. You’ll get perspectives that you can agree or disagree with. You can engage with them. You know they’re coming from a person. I wouldn’t voluntarily look like this otherwise.
So that’s the key: maybe authenticity.
How I Use AI (And How I Don’t)
I’m not saying I’m not using AI. When you see me publishing a blog post about this too, I sometimes use AI to help me summarize, but it captures my voice. I make sure that whatever AI I use doesn’t overdo it with correcting me. And you actually have to correct AI—it’s not always correct.
So you’ll get me speaking right now. You’ll get a cleaned-up transcript later with the help of AI, but still in my voice. That’s it.
Building a Track Record of Authenticity
You’ll also get a history of what I’ve been doing. If you go to the website, you’ll be able to see an archive of my work over the years. If you then continue on to the blog, this is the more modern version that should also work better on a cell phone. These are all my most recent blog posts, and you will see some of the video transcripts.
All of this here is an archive of my work. I’m not trying to hide anything. You can look at poems, music, blog entries, even sometimes old seminar papers if you so desire.
So you can get a picture of what I stand for, what I have stood for. There are some instances where I have changed my mind on things. There will be some where I still will, but you get hopefully as much of a full person as you can get—with, of course, one caveat.
Measured Authenticity: The East German Influence
I’m a trained East German. You will probably hear me trying to be as careful as possible about how I phrase things. You will not hear me make facile throwaway lines, I hope, and I try to be fair. This carefulness in speaking, this carefulness in writing, in my view, would also be a good model to follow for a society that needs to find its center, that needs to find how we still can live together and communicate with each other without the vitriol that we so frequently see.
So you get a form of authenticity that’s still authentic but that also is measured.
The Algorithm vs. Authentic Communication
Does the algorithm like this? Probably not. It would probably be beneficial to me if I wanted to monetize this to be as caustic and as one-sided as possible. But you have content like that already. You can see this wherever you watch drama content. I’m not here for drama. I’m here, hopefully, to provide you with a calm voice of a strong stance for centrist democratic—for lack of a better word—normality.
You will see me agitated sometimes when it comes to some forms of injustice, like certain wars that I talk about. You will see that I do have opinions on things, but I will try to express them in a way that I can still keep in communication with others, because that’s the key.
I do want you to come back and keep listening. I do want you to engage. I foresee a time when we can establish something also as better conversations.
What Society Should Do
But this is also what we as society should do. We should be authentic in a moderated way. We should speak to each other expecting that we have created a space so we can continue to speak with each other.
This means:
- No insults
- No over-the-top hyperbole
- No promoting a form of discourse that doesn’t leave the other person a space to disagree
I hope I’m doing that. I’m trying to do that. And I hope this is what you like too.
The Danger of Teaching AI Our Worst Traits
But it is important—especially to come back to the initial hook—it is important when we look at artificial intelligence that we do center our humanity.
It is also important that we teach artificial intelligence to look at this form of moderated authenticity, to a form of discourse and behavior that does not reward extremism.
Some years ago, you may or may not remember, Microsoft played with the idea of an AI chatbot called Tay. And because just as our biological children learn from parents, our technological children learn from them too. So this escalated quickly, and after a very short time they had to pull the plug because Tay went down a rabbit hole of all kinds of extremist thought and violent thought and really offensive speech—really to the point where any normal person, even probably extremist persons, would think it was extreme.
I read that recently there were some attempts at trying to war game certain scenarios of current strategies and developments, and that AI tends to be more aggressive and more prone to warfare than we would imagine. That isn’t good.
We Are Teaching AI How to Be Human
Whatever we say, whatever we write, we feed that into artificial intelligence, into large language models or whatever we have. So we are teaching AI how to think. We are teaching AI how to behave. We are teaching it how humans are.
Really? Is that a recipe for success?
And I know we can’t undo all of human utterances in history. We are what we are, and it’s not always pleasant. But we can work against that. We can not only teach each other but also teach AI what the norms of society should be—that we don’t always live up to them, but that doesn’t invalidate them.
Conclusion
So much for now. I’ll probably return to that topic, and I hope this was authentic enough. And yes, this is not AI talking. This is just me. Thank you very much.
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
Erratic Attempts 