Own voice, AI, and authenticity
Can AI develop authentic "Black, Asian, Latino identity-based content?"
There has been a lot of discussion on #Ownvoice in fiction and other media. We've seen the familiar moves in this discussion several times, and I won't rehearse them here. With AI we now have the promise of generated content with minority identities that tap an “authentic voice,” as Lee Fang reports:
No need to hire minority writers anymore! It will sound authentic anyway and help your corporate brand!
Is this possible? It depends on your notion of authenticity. So let me take an influential one, proposed by French existentialists such as Beauvoir, Fanon, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.
Existentialist views on authenticity
Existentialists reject what Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968, 73) called “high altitude thinking” (pensées de survol), the idea that we should somehow overcome our own situation, the reality of our body in its physical, cultural, and historical setting, in order to find out how things “really” are.
According to existentialists, the quest for objectivity and rational detachment in philosophy is a fundamentally misguided enterprise. Truth is not some abstract thing out there, but a function of your lived and felt experience. Here's already an issue in implementing this with AI, because AI, to the best of our knowledge, does not live or feel anything.
Related to this is authenticity, a central virtue of existentialism, a search for a harmonious existence with one’s surroundings. The word “authenticity” derives from the Greek “αὐθεντικός – authentikos,” meaning original or genuine. When I am authentic, I’m not (just) fulfilling a role that society prescribes – I am true to the commitments and concerns that are specific to me, as an individual.
Note (this is a common misconception so let me stress it!) this is not the same as “looking for your true self,” as when you go on an Eat, Pray, Love tour of self-discovery.
For an existentialist, authenticity is about harmonizing or coordinating your facticity (the objective facts of your existence such as your body, culture, and history) with your freedom at this moment in time. An existentialist doesn't deny that we are situated. She tries to find her meaning and freedom in that very situatedness.
As a fact in the world, you are what you have been (your past), but as a freedom in the world you have a future that you are not yet and that you must choose. Authenticity is reconciling these in a sober assessment of your personal situation. Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness describes a waiter who was a little too into the waitering: “He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.”
Fanon's notion of authenticity
Authenticity also means the freedom to not confirm to certain gendered or racial identities that others impose on you, as Frantz Fanon held.
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was a French existentialist philosopher who was born on the island of Martinique (a Caribbean island) under French colonial rule. In Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952), Fanon argues that the judgmental gaze of white Europeans can disrupt a black person’s connection to the world and to themselves. Through this objectifying look (le regard, a concept we encounter first in Sartre), a black person becomes reduced to an object, and is no longer a thinking subject. He argues that Black people are locked in blackness and white people are locked in whiteness. By this, he means that the subjective experience of being considered Black or white pushes us in certain ways of doing things and in certain ways of perceiving ourselves.
Now, Fanon argues it is hard to push oneself out of this objectifying gaze and become aware of a broader range of possibilities. We see a similar theme in W.E.B Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, where marginalized individuals such as Black people in the US have to simultaneously hold into mind not only their own views, ideas, etc but also the conceptions and prejudices of the dominant majority (of white people).
Why AI cannot even sound authentic
Due to these complex dynamics, and the interplay of our situatedness with the world, minority identities are not some sort of thing you can construct or even accurately represent by finding stable associations between keywords. Rather, they are continued negotiations and indeed continued struggles to assert oneself and to carve out for oneself the right, for example, to pursue a wide range of interests (several of which non-minorities take for granted), to experience a range of emotions (and not just those stereotypically associated with the minority identity) and so on.
This also means that #ownvoice work evolves not only because we all evolve and society evolves, but also because the (power and other) relationships between certain marginalized and non-marginalized identities changes continuously. This makes it either less or more possible to dare to write or express something.
Think of Isabel Fall's Helicopter Story, published in Clarkesworld but withdrawn at the request of the author. It originally had the title “I self-identify as an attack helicopter", which reclaims that transphobic trope in an ingenious piece of thoughtful military SF. Now, many people on Twitter, incensed by the title and without actually reading the story attacked the magazine and the author, who was a trans woman. She subsequently felt that she had failed the test of being trans, she commented that she hoped people would understand that “‘This story was written by a woman who understands being a woman.’ I obviously failed horribly.”
It's such a heart-wrenching story of what can go wrong when we jump quickly to judgment. Many people since have recognized beauty and profundity in the story, but it's clear that the Internet was not ready for Isabel Fall. And yet, in taking those risks, the huge risk of testing one's trans identity in the public sphere to a less than benign audience, I would say Fall was being authentic.
Already with our minority identities being captured by branding, this sort of risk taking is inimical. The branding will always be lackluster, the opposite of daring, the opposite of the Black person Fanon had in mind who tries to free himself from the objectifying gaze. For that, you need to take risk and also (paradoxically) to trust that the audience will not rip you apart but take at least something of a charitable attitude to your work.
As Joe Keohane writes, this destruction of authenticity long predates AI. Faced with the ecology of online content, magazines went into a joint arms race to the bottom and “trashed their brand equity, exhausted their workforces, bored/insulted their readers, and created a situation where the only people who could afford to write for them were people who don’t actually need to work.”
The result was predictable “After a few years of this, the magazine business as we know it collapsed. And now Vice and Buzzfeed, the disruptors who helped set off this stampede to the bottom, are failing too. (I haven't even heard the name "HuffPost" in years, thank God".
So, in order to reclaim authenticity as this dynamic negotiation process of your facticity (embodiment) and the world, merely resisting AI is not enough.
We need to resurrect serious paid magazine writing and stop the race to the bottom.
And we should definitely resist the use of minority identities as some sort of branding, which is precisely the opposite of what a striving for authenticity being a minority means.