Personality is hard currency in an AI future
Av Mikael Jisander
on 24 January, 2025
Artificial Intelligence is on everyone's lips and hardly a day goes by without us hearing about new achievements, or setbacks, for the technology. Recently, many people have been both surprised and outraged by Meta's initiative to launch AI accounts on its platforms. Accounts that look and act like real people, but are just digital ghosts.
Aftonbladet quotes an article in the Financial Times in which Connor Hayes, Meta's product manager for generative AI, makes a statement:
"We envision that these AI characters will exist on our platforms in the same way as regular accounts. They will have biographies and profile pictures and they will publish their own content."
If I hadn't already closed my Facebook account, the above statement would make me immediately hit the delete button. It feels like Meta is building a stage set - a nice facade to the street but completely empty behind it. And why on earth should I spend my precious time scrolling through AI-generated content? To feed Facebook's ad algorithms? I don't think so.
Explosion of AI content
AI is of course not just about social media. SVT Nyheter has published an article about AI books. Apparently, libraries' purchasing departments have begun to be flooded with AI-written works. Magdalena Ivarsson is a school librarian at Consensum upper secondary school in Lund and coordinates purchases for 32 school libraries. She has learned to recognize the AI-written books:
"In December 2024, I received 70 emails, 68 of them about books written with AI. The characters look the same in all of these books and the stories are also similar in both content and language."
In recent years, there has literally been an explosion of AI-generated content. At first glance, it can be difficult to distinguish whether the material is produced by a computer or a human, but when you scratch the surface, the AI backdrop often collapses like a house of cards. It feels... boring and predictable. And linguistically a bit poor.
A blood-sucking vampire
The discussion around AI highlights an important issue. Authenticity. Do we really want content created by machines? I can only answer for myself, but this is completely uninteresting. Words need to mean something. They need to have a sender who wants to say something, otherwise they are just empty calories. You feel full, but you have not been nourished.
My emptiness after consuming AI content is basically because we humans are curious about other humans. We want to learn about the experiences and thoughts of others. Movies that start with the tagline "Based on a true story", often ring louder than regular fiction. It makes us feel excited that the story being told has actually happened. That means it could happen to me too.
Undoubtedly, AI will get better and better at mimicking human-produced content. However, it lacks one crucial characteristic - personality. It has no personal experience, no drive and no ego. It lacks consciousness and ambition, and can only serve up a puddle of previously created content. The result may seem like a real story, but it's really just stacking words based on a contextual probability calculation. Words that don't mean anything to AI, because it lacks emotion. And this is where AI reveals itself as the vampire it fundamentally is. AI only works when it has the blood of others to feed on.
Authenticity beats AI
As a writer, I can sometimes critically examine myself and wonder why I should try to create something new. Everything has already been said. All the stories have already been told. What can I add that no one else has written?
The simple answer is - my version. Only I can tell my stories, in my personal voice. I have my way of looking at the world, and so do you. As human beings, we are unique, with all our quirks. And we are not perfect, thankfully. In fact, our human faults and imperfections can be our greatest asset going forward.
When the novelty of AI wears off, we will demand more from the content we consume. When the machine can be fast and rational, we humans can counter with experience and personality. Genuine emotion will then trump the thin, generic AI soup any day of the week.
Personality is the hard currency that no AI can match. It gives us hope!
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