Authenticity will be a moat

(Dumping my disgruntled thoughts which I’ve had for a year or so, not meant to be as structured)

Authenticity will be a moat, and as dystopian as that may sound, it will come true.

We’ve seen shards of this partially come true with the massive-uptick in personal branding, and non-commercial personal branding, whether you get to know a personality, build a para-social relationship with them, and trust them over their contemporaries.

We crave human connection, be it physical or virtual, and the social connection offered by social media and messaging has structured society’s fabric in a manner where all interactions have shifted from offline to online, and now this is changing once again where all ONLINE interactions are shifting towards being between a human and an AI agent, a human and an LLM, and here, the last straw breaks.

In the coming years, we will have some difficulty in emotionally connecting with tools like Replika, and other hyper-personalized, context aware tools where you can vent out, but over the course of some time, we will get over the stigma.

Our feeds will be filled with AI UGC, AI-slop, AI-everything, curated perfectly, personalized just for you, and this will start to bother us.

Anti-AI stance will be adopted by companies as a distinguishing factor, particularly focused on in their marketing collaterals.

“This shoe was NOT designed using AI at all”, “We DON’T use AI”, “Crafted entirely by humans”

This type of branding, much like bespoke vs ready-to-made, will demand a premium

Imperfections will become an attractive factor in the world where your porn is custom-designed to play to your fetishes, to your fantasies.

In a world where the AI knows your exact trigger words.

In a world where everything is designed exactly to your liking.

You will start to crave for things that go (anti-culture) against this culture of extreme personalization, and here is where authenticity will play a big factor.

That unpolished person presenting their raw, deepest thoughts, that will start becoming attractive. Hence why we pay extra attention to low-quality ramblings on Instagram, or very low quality video because that’s so opposite to the trend of an increasing per-second production quality required to thrive on socials.

There will come an era where people will not have a “personality”, everything will be so homogeneous, that anyone having a sprinkling of weirdness, quirkyness, edge, or just anyone with a bit of personality different from the culture (going anti-culture) will be extremely attractive.

(I’m sure this rambling of mine makes no sense, but I wanted to pen it down. I’m not able to articulate myself well, I’m aware.)