The devilish thing about the phenomenon of fashion in all its forms is that everyone wants to use it to express their individual personality, yet in the end, everyone looks the same. Or sounds the same. Yet everyone thinks they’re the first to have discovered it; everyone is convinced they’re the only one who… This applies to clothes, haircuts, and trends in all their forms, and even public discourse runs on Auto-Tune.
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With emphasis, of course.
Everyone is singing correctly, but wrongly.
Auto-Tune —that’s the recording studio software that, many years ago, made it possible for the first time to adjust pitch in real time without changing the tape speed. Suddenly, everyone could sing in tune, even live. Or at least, that was the illusion it created.
Cher turned this magical tool into a stylistic device in 1998 with “If You Believe,” thereby triggering a ridiculous Auto-Tune epidemic—the recording studio responsible should have been renamed Wuhan Studios. Thanks to the so-called Cher effect, everyone sounded the same; the slight squeak in the voice—not really audible but perceptible—became the official “this is how you sound today” sound in the charts and mainstream radio playlists. If someone relied on their own voice, it sounded almost foreign.
Like every trend, the synthetically polished sound of glass plates was followed by a countertrend—in this case, a liberating one. Singer-songwriters came into their own. A standout example is Ed Sheeran, who—with just his songs, his guitar, and his own voice, supported by sound loops he creates live on stage—transforms packed stadiums into erupting volcanoes of excitement from the very first note. It’s actually a good idea: being able to do a lot yourself and backing it up with technology you’ve mastered. You could call it “augmented personality” and hope for maximum contagiousness across many other fields. As it stands, that’s still going to take a little while. To be honest, I’m already dreading the expected countertrend and am stocking up on plenty of earplugs.
The Imperative of Empty Phrases.
These days, public discourse is rife with the categorical Auto-Tune imperative. Pretending, endless posturing, and replacing the cherished cultural skill of speaking with a barrage of empty phrases from the arsenal of clichés. We can’t do without it anymore. And everyone is convinced they’re the only ones—or even original—just as Kurt Tucholsky put it: “Nothing makes a person prouder than what they’ve known for the past two minutes.” And they don’t let anyone off the hook in the face of this knowledge.
Are people still dancing, or are they just mimicking the moves?
Is it still possible to take photos without posing and putting on that standard, forced smile?
Do you completely lose your street cred if you don’t start every sentence with “Exactly,” end it with “Exactly,” and throw in a “Exactly” here and there as filler?
Is it still okay to say something like “please get in touch,” or is the only option now the overly confident “feel free to message me”?
To be continued, unfortunately.
Yes, buzzwords, slang, and sociolects—that is, language use typical of specific groups—are certainly part of that vibrant diversity, and sometimes such expressions spill over into mainstream usage. There’s nothing wrong with that. Language changes just as everyday culture changes. But that doesn’t have to turn into a sad cacophony of self-expression, in which nothing is displayed but the inner emptiness that one tries to fill by pretending on the outside that there’s something there, in the hope that there might be something in it for oneself to gain. In fact, this transforms the emptiness into a vacuum that sucks itself into collective nothingness. Keeping up with the times looks a lot like chasing a trend, just as one can hardly tell the difference between eating and chewing gum at first glance. When it comes to nutritional value, the difference quickly becomes clear. Suddenly, art no longer imitates life, nor does life imitate art; instead, life imitates artificiality and loses what is real—that is, itself.
LinkedIn on Auto-Tune.
Nowhere is this more immediately apparent than on social media platforms, which, in many ways, act as high-performance engines designed to accelerate brand growth. For me, this is most painful to witness on LinkedIn. It’s painful because AI-generated drivel and empty platitudes are rampant everywhere—from posts to comments—and also because LinkedIn is, or at least could be, truly well-suited for professional use. Yes, selling is naturally part of the mix there: ideas, services, personal brands, corporate influencers, thought leadership, employer branding, and so on, with the goal that these activities will soon have a significant and positive impact on one’s own business. Everyone knows that.
I approach this with a clear, earnest attitude toward content marketing: I provide my community with useful content and am happy when something comes back in return. It’s not about give and take, but about giving and receiving—without a necessary causal connection as a prerequisite. This is an important distinction in the content marketing narrative, by the way, and can already be found in the Bhagavad Gita: “Your duty is only to work, but never for the fruits; let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be in inaction.” This, and only this, is how true meaning arises through action, entirely in the spirit of the holy Viktor Frankl: “Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must happen.”
Despite all the sales pitches, there’s a striking amount of useful content to be found on LinkedIn, just as strikingly little of the usual social media nonsense, but by now a striking amount of AI-generated drivel—in other words, writing on autopilot as well . Often you notice it right away, often not at all, but you can always sense it. After all, that’s just the nature of the beast, because large language models are based on calculating probabilities based on the frequency of word combinations, presenting them as new results, and bubbling up through the self-amplified probability. In reality, this results in copies of plagiarized content.
This is not unlike what we humans produce, for we constantly gather, interpret, and recombine what we know; we translate existing ideas into new, current contexts; we stand on the shoulders of giants; and in doing so, we see a little further than those who came before us—and even further than the giants themselves, as Isaac Newton told us with wise humility about his work. But in the end, what AI apps generate is, in itself, artificial.
The Cher Effect in a cover version.
It seems to me that AI-style writing has reached a point where it’s taken on a life of its own, to the extent that people trying to write on self-improvement platforms are imitating AI styles because they think that’s how it’s really supposed to sound. The Cher effect in cover versions. At the same time, it often forces you to stop doing certain things because the AI has overused them, and then suddenly your own natural language sounds like you’re spitting out a prompt’s output. Authenticity is driven out of you with the algorithm’s rod, and language—as the boundaries of your own world—is tightened with the large-language model’s noose.
Take my beloved em dashes, for example—the end of the line. They’ve been buried by those who used to sometimes mistake short hyphens for em dashes and are now being duped by their AI apps into using long dashes—which are just as incorrect in our part of the world—as if they were em dashes.
Just to be clear: I use AI extensively in my work, like a tireless team of assistants—for researching, structuring, proofreading, focusing, organizing, and so on. Time and again, I even learn a lot from it myself; in a way, the AI prompts me. But coming up with the ideas and writing them down—that’s something I do myself, because thinking for yourself is what makes you smart. Anyone who always drives with a GPS no longer finds their way on their own—least of all the way home—but degenerates into an autopilot who doesn’t know their destination.
It’s quite possible that I’m overestimating myself and the significance of my work, but I simply assume that people who view my work aren’t interested in how skilled I am at improvising; rather, they’re interested in what I have to say and what they can take away from it—whether as a source of inspiration, motivation, or even as a challenge—to apply to their own work.
Yes, even when I need illustrative images or a sound effect, I use AI apps, but I don’t confuse that with an original work or even with art.
Art is a form of human expression—more than that, it is a process of searching, questioning, discovering, and being found by answers. It is certainly decorative and entertaining, but always human. Of course, we’ve long since switched to taking photos instead of painting the images we want to preserve. And the fact that, thanks to Gutenberg’s ingenuity, copyists—once the sole source of text reproduction—have dried up hasn’t made the world any poorer. Yet at its core lies the spirit that one person conveys to another. Often not all that much, as a stroll through your favorite bookstore or a quick channel-surf the night before makes clear, but always a little bit, one way or another. Nevertheless, Helene Fischer and Bob Dylan have different professions.
A bubble full of nothing?
So if we continue to frame the story of AI in terms of faster, more efficient, bigger, and above all, “more and more,” we will turn our world into a bubble filled with nothing. If, however, we reframe the AI narrative and make it deeper, broader, and more benevolent, we could—paradoxically—give humanity a powerful boost through artificiality.
AI is not the end of creativity; rather, it may even mark the beginning of a new creative era. It takes care of the routine tasks for us, removes barriers to entry and implementation, and frees us up—or, for many of us, even enables us for the first time to think more clearly, imagine things, and bring to life what only humans are capable of creating. AI can help us use our talents and abilities to bring to life the ideas that are floating around, waiting to be brought into the world by us. One of these abilities could be prompting, because the truism that “no one is replaced by AI, but rather by a person who can use AI tools” contains not only a great deal of truth, but also a steering wheel that you and I can operate.
The future belongs to creators.
The more everything is polished to perfection with Auto-Tune and artificiality, the greater the demand for Ed Sheeran, so to speak. For originality, for the authentic, the raw, the patina of lived experience, for creativity and the will to shape, for the spontaneous, the unpredictable, the non-algorithmizable, for the creator who wields the tool and does not confuse form with content—even when form is often a substantial part of the message and content, as is the case in pop culture. The future belongs to the creators who choose to make meaning possible, not to simply produce more stuff.
And now the companies and brands—the economy, as the most productive narrative machine of our time—come into play. What if, instead of using everything AI has to offer (or at least not only) to increase profits, we used it to free people from monotonous, routine work? What if we used it to pull them off the slippery slope of burnout and frustration and encourage them to realize their potential, empowering them to become creators of purpose, meaning, and a sense of fulfillment? Yes, in business! Not in some philanthropic hall of illusions. After all, purpose and profit are not only not opposites; purpose (even if it has become a buzzword) is the best, most viable, and—in the literal sense—most sustainable source of profit, which, by the way, does not materialize solely in quarterly earnings and shareholder value.
If we approached the matter this way, we would redefine what success means in those old, hackneyed success stories—or rather, we would put the brakes on the degrading logic of instrumental reason, according to which everything and everyone must be optimized and turned into a profit-maker in some form or another. We could begin to understand education for what it is, rather than as a nicer term for the restructuring measures we use to prevent young people from fulfilling their desire for self-realization—because we see them only as human resources, credit-card holders, and end consumers, as end-consumed individuals in fact—and otherwise no longer recognize the value of the human being.
AI as humanity’s sixth sense?
Who knows, maybe artificial intelligence is our Excalibur—a symbol of the calling we embrace, of a new, better, more peaceful world that is truly possible—or even the brush with which we paint a new vision of humanity that lives up to that name. I, for one, am going to give it a try. Are you in?
Thanks to artificial intelligence, we are collectively writing a new story about authenticity and humanity. That would be a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan, wouldn’t it? AI as a Sixth Sense. The perfect elixir that will bring us home from our collective hero’s journey to our old world.
So is AI hype or hope? Opportunity or doom? The end of humanity or the beginning of a new humanity? The answer is clear: Yes! It depends on how you look at it, and yet it is always both—and so much more. It is like the story we tell ourselves about it, like the narrative we follow.
Possibilists have the better T-shirt.
As we all know, pessimists and optimists are equally often wrong, but they say that optimists have much more fun in the process. In any case, it is we possibilists who find the most meaning in what we do. We see paradise, we are aware of the serpent, and we recognize the potential of powerful, benevolent narratives that are worth believing in because they carry us into the realm of possibilities.
That’s exactly why our T-shirt says:“New Story. New Glory.”