Opinion | AI is challenging us to rethink the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fake’

As we immerse ourselves in the digital world, we enable artificial intelligence (AI) to learn from us and it is rapidly becoming more able to emulate human behaviour. By transforming the way we communicate with one another and engage with information, the symbiosis between analogue and digital realms will change our individual and social fabric.

The social sciences use a concept called authenticity to discriminate between original and derived works. As more of our assets are partially or wholly digital, authenticity is increasingly hard to benchmark. It may be that authentic/inauthentic has always been a false dichotomy, that there never was any clear criteria for discrimination between the two, and that it was merely a matter of what was written down and could be referenced.

Regardless, much of our society is underpinned by intellectual property rights, which depend upon authenticity. Thus, as creative industries adopt AI for commercial applications, we reach a crisis: a need to rebalance the benefits of permissive, fair use against copyright.

Easy access to image generators such as Stable Diffusion and Dall-E have democratised collaborative creation with AI. At the same time, the impressive capabilities of text-generating large language models are being explored, leading to a boom in so-called prompt engineering.

AI’s impact on the creative process has entered our everyday lives with unprecedented speed. Within two months of its launch, ChatGPT garnered 100 million users, making the AI chatbot the fastest-growing consumer app ever.