Authenticity, A Buzzword

Having spent much of the recent past cycling through periods of dread, lamentation, and disgust, I've come to realise the irony (or lack thereof) of our rapidly spiralling society. A few years ago, I was inspired to pen this piece after witnessing fledgeling AI tools at work. I felt as though we, at the time, were at a pivotal moment in human history – a fork in the road where on one side lay the truth; the other was riddled with fakes. I couldn't be more wrong, as there was no fork in the road at that point. We were (and still are) well on the illusory path of a machine-generated version of reality that continually drags us further away from truth.

We can speak at length about people's disconnection with the natural world, or how people are selling products that are displayed, described, and marketed by AI agents. Manufactured reality is so pervasive that to "stand out" from the crowd involves cultivating some sort of uniqueness and applying this to whichever of the myriad fields currently in dire need of it. Underpinning all of this is a word that many entities have now liberally adopted: authenticity.

Authenticity is now an aesthetic, and I honestly can't believe I'm saying this. It is incredible to witness, the process of having pop culture being bought over by corporations in order to homogenise the human population to a malleable enough level that could be shifted frequently enough to allow for consistent and unprecedented (aka infinite) economic growth. We have wallowed for long enough in this soup of sameness for authenticity to rise not as a form of rebellion, but as another trend. This is what we're doing now.

Technology has made much of our tasks so much easier. AI tools abound and these silicon neural networks have found their way into almost every discipline. It's almost as if anyone can do anything to perfection, once the correct tools are acquired. Within creative fields it is especially horrid. Creativity is holy, it is something that is moulded from deep within the human psyche and pushed forth via paint, word, sculpture, music – life itself is a creative thing. By outsourcing creativity we're robbing ourselves of this basic facet of our lives that makes us human.

In the photography sphere this is evident in the level of perfection – almost too perfect – within people's social media feeds, portfolios, and so on. This is not an overnight occurrence, its precursor was the "manufactured look" that became prevalent in magazines and popular culture, which then, helped along by tremendous advances in tech, made its way into the personal collections of any and every person who had the wherewithal to touch a camera. We see it as crisp, clean images with creamy, monotone backgrounds. Social media platforms like Instagram helped to push this aesthetic forward, so much so that it eventually formed the baseline formula for recognition. Put a modern camera in the hands of anyone and ultimately they'll take a photo that someone, somewhere, will think of as absolutely incredible. There is no need to be deliberate, intentional, or in any way measured in this craft.

The "craft" aspect of it is also fading rapidly. One may argue that this slop of AI-generated pseudo-perfection is galvanising some quarters into producing radically imperfect imagery. While true to an extent, where briefs are prioritising realness over smoothness, we have come to realise that it is becoming profitable to be authentic. The tragedy of this commodification is precisely the nature of profitability. Everyone is going to want to do it, and they're all going to want a shortcut. And so, what's likely to happen? Well, authenticity is being included in mottos, watchwords, and magazine articles, for starters. We can reasonably expect how-to guides on being authentic. LLMs can write articles in an authentic, grounded tone, once prompted properly. Ignoring all what we know about ourselves, we again turn to the machine to tell us how to craft authenticity.

The next step is planned spontaneity.

We travelled halfway around the world to have a chance encounter with a pride of lions that had taken down a buffalo that morning. I photographed this male African Lion leaning halfway out the window as he tore into the carcass. The look in his eye is what captivated me most, not dissimilar to any other animal considered to be much more benign in disposition. It was, to me, a look of purity, of innocence, of this is an animal simply having a meal as its kind has done for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the kind of experience which lingers in the minds of observers, and I hope that you can see what I see in this frame. Raw, uncut, real.

WIX knows I am a wildlife photographer and has taken the liberty of including abominations like this in my library of website files. This is what further widens the gap between real, imagined, and prompted.