Copyright © Françoise Herrmann
The American Merriam-Webster Dictionary selected ‘authentic’ as the 2023 Word of the Year. A selection that "definitely wasn't picked by AI", according to the National Public Radio (NPR) journalist Emily Olson (Olson, Nov. 27, 2023). Indeed, Merriam-Webster traditionally selects the Word of the Year, based on significant spikes in the number of searches for a particular term in its 500,000-word corpus. Look-up spikes that generally directly correlate with events occurring in the world. Even if, in 2023, several spikes in 5-letter-word searches, related to the New York Times game WORDLE, had to be removed to avoid skewing computations.*
Nonetheless, it is hardly uncoincidental that searches for the term ‘authentic’ spiked compared to previous years, considering that one of the most exciting events in Artificial Intelligence also occurred this year. The fact of the matter is that the OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT repeatedly passed the Turing Test of Artificial Intelligence—more than 70 years after the challenge was posed. A challenge misleadingly beaten, however, since it is far too easy to lose sight of the fact that beating the Turing Test only means fooling almost everyone on the planet into thinking they are communicating with a real human being,—or reading text produced by a human being—instead of a machine. A machine that, in this case, has been trained on a mega corpus to generate responses, based on very statistically probable word combinations.
Thus, with so much duplicity factored into the renewed hyperbolic excitement for AI, as Chomsky (2023) reminded us, no wonder that searches for the definition of the term ‘authentic’ surged. However, if you are still unconvinced about the necessary deceit of AI, then consider widespread concern for threats to identity in the era of 'deepfake' images and videos; celebrities such as Elon Musk calling for more ‘authenticity’ on social media, and the new French Social Media Platform “BeReal”, all of which Merriam-Webster also put forward as explanations for the observed surge in searches for the definition of the term ‘authentic’. Observations in Merriam-Webster dictionary look-up, which naturally resulted in the selection of ‘authentic’ as the 2023 WOTY.
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* The New York Times online game WORDLE sends approximately two million players worldwide searching for 5-letter words, every morning.
Chomsky, N. et al. (March 8, 2023). Noam Chomsky: The false promise of ChatGPT. NYTimes Guest Opinion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html
Olson, E. (Nov. 27, 2023). Merriam-Webster word of the year definitely wasn’t picked by AI.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/27/1215372795/merriam-webster-word-of-the-year-2023-authentic
Staff (Nov. 27, 2023). Word of the Year 2023: 'Authentic,' plus 'rizz,' 'deepfake,' 'coronation,' and other words that defined the year.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year
The Turing Test - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/
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