Reflection: Pangram, Authenticity, and Me

I suppose it started back in middle school, which for me was back when Google Hangouts was a thing. I’m sure that sentence alone gave many people around my age shivers about their dark teenage days.

Middle school is a dark age for many, and with the power of the internet, there’s probably a lot more of our past out there than we’d like to admit. I envy those that lived in the age of lost media.

To start, I guess I should say that I was probably online a lot more than I should have been at my age. I wasn’t really aware of this until one day, when a friend mentioned to me:

Hey, you kind of talk like [Name of YouTuber].

Note that the name has been censored here to protect the right to privacy of my middle school self.

And this… concerned me. As much as I found this particular YouTuber entertaining to watch, it wasn’t someone I wanted to be identified with, frankly. Especially as a guy going through his teenage years at the peak of puberty.

This kept me up for days. What did that passing comment even mean? Was it my tone? My word choice? Was I using their catchphrases without even noticing? What was going on?

Before I knew it, I’d picked up some random person’s vibes just from watching so much of their content.

And I suppose, looking back, there have been many such cases throughout my life.

Until college, I pronounced “supermarket” with a shu because that’s how it was pronounced in Korean. I spoke (and still do, only worsened by the fact that I’ve been in London for the past month) with a slightly posh accent despite never having met a British person, much less having been anywhere near Europe or the UK. Needless to say, I was a big fan of Harry Potter growing up.

I guess the point I’m trying to get across is that we, as humans, are creatures of adaptation. We adapt to our surroundings, whether we’re aware of it or not. That’s our single biggest advantage in a world where countless predators are born much stronger and faster than us. We’ve survived by learning and adapting.

The words we use, the jokes we make, the way we react to things, even the opinions we hold. How much of that is really “ours”, and how much have we picked up from the people around us?

I guess one answer is that it’s the combination that matters. None of the individual pieces may be original, but the collection of them is.

And I think there’s something rather comforting about that.

Because otherwise, where do we draw the line? Am I no longer allowed to use a word because someone else used it “first”? Am I supposed to be embarrassed about having an accent? Am I supposed to go through my entire personality and try to figure out which parts are genuinely “mine” and which parts I “borrowed” from someone else?

Honestly, I doubt there would be much left by the end of it.

I think we’re a little too obsessed with the idea of being original. We want to be special, unique, a special little snowflake.

But what does any of that actually mean?

Take writing, for example. Everyone has their own writing style, or at least that’s what we like to think. But that style is something we’ve developed from years of reading other people’s work and being taught how to write in school. So how many people out there actually have their own writing style that is so unique that they have their own category?

Along that same line, I guess I don’t really understand the drama around Pangram and AI-generated content.

Yes, AI-generated content is often bad. We want good text. This is true.

People are out there saying things like “If my Pangram flags your Twitter post, I’m instantly blocking you”.

But good AI-generated text is good, even if it was written by an AI. We had “slop” before AI.

What is good is good, whatever the source. “Slop” is “slop”, whatever the source.

Would you ignore Shakespeare written by a monkey because it didn’t come from some old white guy?

On the other hand, you may be giving humanity a bit too much credit if you think the average person can write better than AI.

At the end of the day, who are you to throw the first stone?

People have become so hypercritical of AI-generated content that it’s almost become ridiculous. And it doesn’t stop there; anything remotely resembling AI-written content gets bashed as well.

AI-generated text from earlier generations contained a lot of em dashes. I know many people around me who were chased away from using em dashes because of these sorts of “witch hunts”.

Next came semicolons.

After that, it was very basic things we learned about how to write in English class, like the rule of three and other forms of clear technical writing.

Now people point at those same things and say that the text was generated by AI and is therefore not worth reading.

And again, the question is, what exactly are we asking people to do? At what point are we just asking people to be less like themselves so they can prove that they’re human?

Isn’t that a little backwards?

We’re so concerned with whether someone’s writing is “authentic” that we’re encouraging people to change the things that make their writing theirs.

If anything, this seems like the same insecurity I had back in middle school. I was so worried about sounding like someone else that it in turn made me less like myself. And now people are worried that sounding like AI makes them less human.

But why should we conform? Especially to standards set by… another AI? Not to throw shade on Pangram (I think the project in concept is really interesting and I’ve even tried training my own model for this to dive deeper!), it’s just that people are maybe using it in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.

I don’t think authenticity should require us to constantly prove that we haven’t been influenced by something else.

Not to say I’m supportive of all AI-generated content.

I, of course, think there are many places where AI has no place, regardless of quality. One example is institutions where the whole point is to have a human do the work, like in education.

I don’t think AI should be used to complete homework assignments. But I also think the reason it’s being used so much by students has a lot to do with the current education system rewarding only the top scores, with AI being an easier way to get there than actually being interested in the subject or assignment.

But that’s its own can of worms that I don’t want to get into here.

The point is that AI has its place.

And I think the question of authenticity becomes a little more complicated when we move from how we write to what we’re actually trying to express.

Modern performance art gets a lot of flak nowadays, with plenty of memes (which I admit I’ve enjoyed fully) being spawned from other people’s attempts at expressing what’s inside them.

But if we asked all of those people to paint a picture instead, it wouldn’t work the same way.

And for those who don’t have such talent in the currently accepted forms of art, these alternatives give them another venue to express themselves.

I think there’s room for different forms of expression, even ones that we personally don’t particularly like or understand ourselves.

And I suppose the same argument could be made for AI (hot take, I know).

Again, I’m not saying every piece of AI-generated content is meaningful, not any more than every painting or piece of writing is meaningful.

Of course, there’s a difference between someone using AI to express an idea they genuinely care about and someone generating a thousand posts just to fill the internet with content. I don’t think those are particularly comparable, even if both are technically AI-generated. Part of the gap is that current AI produces lower-quality content than humans by default, which may change as AI gets more powerful. And I think the bigger goal is to filter out low-quality content, human or not. In my humble opinion, it’s a somewhat naive take to conflate the two.

The question should be more about what they’re trying to express, rather than whose words or whose brushstrokes make up the components.

After all, we’ve always been borrowing from the world around us. The tools have changed, but I don’t think the fundamental question has.

All in all, I guess I’ve come a long way from being embarrassed about sounding like a YouTuber in middle school.

Though, to be fair, I still don’t think I’d particularly be thrilled if someone made the same comparison today.

And yet, here I am, years later, still speaking with the slightest tinge of an accent I have no claim over, using words I’ve learned from other people, and holding opinions that have probably been shaped by more random conversations, books, and experiences than I could ever hope to remember.

I mean, what can I say? We take things in just by living in the moment. Some of them may stick, others may not. We change, we grow, and occasionally we look back and wonder why on earth we used to talk like that.

We’re all products of the things we’ve consumed, whether we like it or not.

And now this will remain a part of you. You’re welcome.