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The word a dictionary chooses as its “word of the year” says a lot about the year that’s been. Most times, the choice is at least partly based on the number of times people have looked up the word via a dictionary’s website or app, an easy measure of what’s on people’s minds and what they want to know more about.
In 2020, Merriam-Webster chose “pandemic,” and in 2021, “vaccine.” In 2022, it was “gaslighting.”
For 2023’s word of the year, Merriam-Webster has crowned “authentic.” That makes a lot of sense as AI has entered the chat, literally and figuratively. In the last 12 months, AI has gone from sort of a hypothetical idea that was on the brink of happening to a very real presence seemingly everywhere.
At this point, I find myself questioning the realness of just about everything. The text of a publicity email, a photo I see on social media, a video on the news. Did a human make that, or was it AI? Most likely, they worked together, which makes “authenticity” a pretty tough thing to define.
I’m going to be real with you: I don’t like AI. I don’t trust AI or the people who made it or the data it learns from. I watched too much Battlestar Galactica (original series and reboot) and read too much near-future dystopian fiction to be able to regard it with anything close to calmness or curiosity. That’s my authentic feeling; it doesn’t have to be yours.
Plenty of artists are keeping a far more open mind about AI. They’re messing around with AI like they’d mess around on a new instrument — a time-honored pathway to creativity. They’re getting to know their way around it, laughing about its limitations, perhaps, but also keeping an eye on the new directions it might open up. Is that so bad?
I mean, maybe.
Here’s what I worry about. Instead of developing robots to do our gruntwork, like crunching numbers or cleaning our houses or taking care of tedious or dangerous factory work, we’re suddenly leaning on them to do our creative work. Why? There’s no scarcity of artists or thinkers, and ideas are an endlessly renewable resource. If we hand off creativity to machines, what is that freeing us up to do, exactly?
Art is something — one of the only things — that makes us truly, uniquely human. If we strip art of its humanity, what is even the point? I don’t want a connection with a robot, and a robot doesn’t yearn for connection with me. When I see or hear or read or in some other way experience art, what moves me is knowing a human was behind it. Someone just like me, or someone nothing like me. But someone who has poured something real into their work, which in turn fills something important in me.
And that’s why roots music, made by humans, matters to me. And to you, too, if you’re reading this. “Authentic” is a word that’s applied to this genre a lot, and it can be interpreted in a lot of ways, sometimes too narrowly. But we know it when we hear it, and I’ve come to value it all the more in these days when “real” is becoming a relative term, something that feels like it might be slipping away.
In the now-classic Son Volt song “Windfall,” Jay Farrar sings about “searching for a truer sound.” I think that’s our shared mission in the No Depression community, and it has been from the magazine’s very beginning. The world has changed, and so has music, drastically, since our founding in 1995, and that’s fine. It’s as it should be. But whatever that “truer sound” sounds like, we should continue to seek it. It won’t come from a robot. It’ll come, like it always has, from the heart.
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If you’re wondering, other dictionaries picked their own words of the year. For dictionary.com, it was “hallucinate,” which just a year ago got an update to its definition to add a meaning with AI context: “to produce false information contrary to the intent of the user and present it as if true and factual.” Oxford University Press went with “rizz.” Maybe I’ll ask my middle schooler to write a column explaining that one to us.
WHAT WE’RE LISTENING TO
Here’s a sampling of the songs, albums, bands, and sounds No Depression staffers have been into this week:
Dolly Parton – “Hard Candy Christmas”
Shinyribs – The Kringle Tingle
The Price Sisters – “There’s a Song in There Somewhere,” from their debut album, Between the Lines, coming in February
Kyle Tuttle – “Hard to Say,” from his new album, Labor of Lust, coming in February
Cordelia – “Little Life”
Dani Larkin – “Come Home to Me”
Brent Cobb – “Southern Star”
Lonesome Ace Stringband – “Thinking Bout Loving Everyone” (proceeds from the single’s downloads through Jan. 1 will be donated to Doctors Without Borders)
