I’ve written about it before, I’ve talked about it before, and that means it showing up in multiple places last week means this is either a sign I’m starting to really figure it out or I need to fumble around with it more. Probably both.

I still think the word is weird. Too thought-leader adjacent. “Authentic.” Why is it authent-ick? It just is. But it’s the right word.

Words are built on other words. That’s what I tell myself when I am stuck on them. And the etymology of authentic is so great it came out in my talk with Ben Hunt last week on the spot, from the recesses of my brain. The root, auth-, means self. It’s the same prefix as you find on less thought-leader adjacent words like automobile, autodidact, autobiography and more.

Automobile is self-moving. Autodidact is self-teaching. Autobiography is self-story.

And authenticity? Self-genuine.

Not genuine in some performative sense. Not genuine in the genuine leather fancy wallet sense, either. Genuinely in charge, like how an author is in charge of the words they choose.

Ben and I have had countless conversations about why AI writing (and AI generated anything) doesn’t land quite the same way. Some of it gets close. I’m sure I can be fooled, too, but once I know it’s like I know and - why is that?

Ben thinks it’s because the author isn’t becoming through the act of writing. It lacks that self-genuine quality. Because when an LLM writes something for a person the LLM is standing outside, observing, and describing something that it only has to technically assemble.

The AI-ick shows up there, where you can feel how nobody changed in the making of the content.

Content is another -ick word, for the record.

In our conversation, Ben brought up some of his favorite books. He talked about how they were his favorite because you could feel how the writing changed the writer.

They were doing authentic work. They were doing the thing, where by being self-genuine in one moment, they were becoming someone else in the next, and the writing captured it.

It’s an earning of something. It’s what I was scratching at in my Epsilon Theory: Unplugged essay. A writer has to want to earn their s***. When I’m a reader, I want to feel you earning it.

I started thinking of writers who made me feel that way in our talk. I ended up talking about Hunter S. Thompson thanks to Jim Ruland and Seth Lorinczi (both authentic writers, ahem) on Just Press Record who were talking about the types of authors who send you to the library vs. the ones who send you out into the world.

Both can be authentic, I think, but the one’s who send you out into the world do so because there’s a visceral, sensory component that they make you feel how their experience changed them, and you get inspired to chase. Now, maybe you’re not going to go do mescaline or something, but reading Thompson describe it - no AI can do that.

Self-genuine is not a fixed state.

That’s the big idea I can’t shake after talking to Ben. These are people in motion. Writing with a direction. Maybe even a prime directive. The auth- is always in process.

I want to read more of that. I want to write more of that.