Runner Up (and winner of Irony of the Year): Deepfake
A few weeks ago, we discussed “Influencer Marketing” as a poor alternative for word-of-mouth in a Serve60Sharp, and now the dictionary gods are chiming in agreement.
The 2023 Merriam-Webster word of the year is Authentic. An excerpt from the article:
- “Ironically, with ‘authentic content creators’ now recognized as the gold standard for building trust, ‘authenticity’ has become a performance.”
Is an authentic performance one or the other, or both? This ties to another of the year’s most popular words – Deepfake. With the advent and widening application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), you’ve likely seen or heard celebrities’ voices or images recreated as an example of how accurate the technology can be.
Differentiation
The value of authenticity in an ever-growing deepfake world hits home for us. There’s only ONE proven way to tell between authentic and deepfake: The person standing in front of you.
We create tools for candidates to build authentic relationships with voters. The most impactful voter interactions happen IRL (in real life), in-person, out in the community, at town hall events, and when candidates meet voters by knocking on their door.
While we would not be surprised to see a Star Trek “Beam me up, Scotty,” hologram walking doors at some point, looking someone in the eye and shaking their hand wins an interaction every time. You can’t fake that.
(To be fair, by Y2K, we expected to be flying individual capsules like The Jetsons.)