Authenticity as the New Firewall: How AI Is Rewriting Digital Trust
Picture this: you walk into a sleek corporate high-rise, eager to impress a sharp-suited representative. You extend your hand in greeting, but instead of the familiar texture of skin and bone, you grasp the cold steel of a robotic palm. You jolt back. You have been tricked. This is no human!
That same discomfort arises when we realize the words on our screens were generated by an algorithm rather than written by a person. In today’s “Brave New World,” AI is everywhere. It’s in reports, phishing emails, customer support chats, and beyond. Much of what we read is no longer born from human fingers moving across a keyboard. As this technology continues to evolve, more of what we watch, read, and believe will be subtly shaped by this inorganic intelligence.
But beyond the novelty of widespread AI usage lies something deeper: the erosion of trust. In cybersecurity, trust is currency. As AI becomes the unseen author behind much of our content, authenticity has emerged as a new kind of security perimeter. Humans now serve as the last line of defense.
The Great Leap Forward into Artificial Intelligence
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, the company likely had no idea how quickly it would reshape communication. The MIT Technology Review’s oral history of the platform’s creation captured that early energy and uncertainty, when the tool’s reach was still unimaginable. Just three years later, ChatGPT has evolved to a platform that can generate photorealistic images, perform deeper research, reason more effectively, and even capture audio, according to Global GPT’s review of its new capabilities.
Tiered paywalls aside, the tool has become the most-used AI platform in the world, with recent reports documenting 4.7 billion web visits and over 546 million monthly users. In short, virtually everybody you know is using it.
The consequences of that usage are everywhere. Each scroll, click, and search is now intertwined with AI-assisted language. Forbes recently reported that Snapchat, Shopify, and Quizlet (among others) have all integrated ChatGPT into their products to power chatbots, digital shopping assistants, and virtual tutors. Whether we like it or not, we are all consuming AI-shaped content across a growing ecosystem of digital tools.
And that brings us to one oddly famous symptom of AI: the em dash. A quick search for “Why does ChatGPT use the em dash so much?” reveals countless complaints. Grammar purists and casual readers alike have spotted the quirk, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The rhythm of AI language itself, from its punctuation to its cadence and tone, has become part of its unmistakable pattern.
Humanity Resists
Rather than diving into linguistic analysis, I’m more interested in how we collectively respond to the rhythm of AI, a rhythm we seem to recognize quickly and resist instinctively. What does it say about us that we cringe at these patterns? I suspect it reveals something deeper: humans have an innate preference for the authentic. We grow uneasy when something artificial imitates human creation too closely. This resistance to the unfamiliar is timeless. From the printing press to the camera, and eventually to the internet, we’ve always feared what’s alien.
In cybersecurity, this instinct is not just philosophical; it’s protective. It doesn’t matter if it’s a phishing attempt or a simple email; our ability to detect a human voice behind the message shapes our defenses. When AI blurs that instinct, authenticity becomes a matter of digital security.
Working in marketing, I feel this tension every day. Brands are urged to sound “authentic” and “human,” yet the more we lean on AI to achieve that, the more homogenized our voices become. The result is what technologists have begun calling AI slop, language that is clean but hollow, polished but disconnected from real emotion, as described by The Conversation in 2024. From repetitive sentence structures to emoji-heavy, blocky paragraphs, we are surrounded by messages that feel soulless, and perhaps that irony speaks for itself.
Consumers are noticing. Forbes noted in 2023 that “brand authenticity enables companies to build better customer relationships, promoting brand closeness and encouraging them to make a purchase. The trusting customer relationship formed is iterative and regenerative, meaning that trust compounds over time. If the same holds for distrust, which seems likely, brands that lean too far into the AI abyss may soon encounter lower consumer confidence in their products and services.
Wrapping it Up
Until very recently, writing was a purely human craft. While AI’s prose still carries stiffness and repetition, there will come a time when its mimicry is so refined that humans may no longer tell the difference. Already, people accuse human writers of using AI, perhaps suggesting that our sense of trust is shifting into paranoia. Does this mean that in an era increasingly defined by digital suspicion, authentic content (however we define it) is becoming its own form of psychological security? Maybe our aversion to the em dash has less to do with punctuation and more to do with our need to protect our grasp on reality.
Before I conclude, consider this article as its own little experiment. Did you notice my grammatical choices? Or the absence of those telltale punctuation marks? If so, ask yourself: was this the product of human fingers moving across a keyboard, or of manufactured joints attached to cold steel palms? And more importantly, would that change how much you trust it?
