There is a painting that used to be a Vermeer. 'The Supper at Emmaus' hung in Rotterdam's Boijmans Museum from the late 1930s, praised by the era's leading Vermeer scholar as possibly the master's finest work. Then in 1945 a Dutch painter named Han van Meegeren, arrested for selling art to the Nazis, told his interrogators that he had painted it himself. He had. Nothing on the canvas changed that day. Every brushstroke stayed where it was. What collapsed was the provenance, and with it, nearly all of the value.
I keep coming back to that story, because I think we are all about to live inside it. Voices, faces, prose, and whole conversations can now be faked well enough that telling the copy from the original stops being something you do by looking. And once the copy is free, instant, and indistinguishable, quality stops being the thing that carries value. The fakes will be high quality. What carries value is the fact of coming from a real person, in a real moment. Which means authenticity is about to change category: from a personality trait to an economic good, and possibly a luxury one.
Two meanings, converging
By authenticity I mean two things that used to be separate. The inner kind is correspondence: how closely what you show matches what is actually there. The outer kind is provenance: whether a thing verifiably came from the source it claims. Walter Benjamin was already worrying about the outer kind in 1935, in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. He argued that a copy cannot carry what he called the aura of the original, its unique existence in one place and time. Photography strained that idea. Generative models break it open, because now the thing being reproduced is not a work but a person: your voice, your face, your particular way of putting sentences together.
So the two meanings are collapsing into one scarce quality: a real person, actually meaning the thing, traceably. I help build an assessment platform, and this is not an abstract problem for us. When someone types out their own answer to a hard moral question, part of what makes that answer worth anything is that a specific human sat there and produced it. The moment you cannot establish that, the signal is gone, however eloquent the words are.
What it isn't
A few things get confused with authenticity. Oversharing is the obvious one; telling everyone everything is a performance of openness, not openness. 'That's just how I am' is another, usually deployed as a license to skip the work of becoming someone better. But the one worth dwelling on is the authenticity industry itself: the carefully lit confession video, the strategically admitted flaw, the behind-the-scenes clip with its own producer. Rawness became a format somewhere in the last decade, and the format is now refined enough that performed vulnerability often reads as more authentic than the real thing. I don't have a clean way out of that loop. When realness becomes a marketing strategy it stops being real, and everyone selling it knows this, and sells it anyway.
We already pay for this
You can see the premium in ordinary life before any market touches it. A friend writes to you after something bad happens, and you can tell they wrote it themselves: some of the words are slightly wrong, in the way that only real effort produces. A perfectly composed note that you suspect took two seconds to generate might contain better sentences. It is a worse gift, and everyone understands why without quite being able to say it. The value was never in the prose.
Markets have started pricing the same instinct. Recorded music is effectively free, and live shows, the one format that cannot be faked at you, keep getting more expensive. Vinyl, the least convenient format on sale, has been growing for years; in 2020 it out-earned CDs in the US for the first time since the 1980s. 'Handmade' already commands a premium over factory goods that are, by any measurable standard, better made. I don't think this is mostly nostalgia. A record, a live show, a wobbly ceramic mug: each is a proof of provenance you can hold. The singer's voice cracking on the high note works the same way, evidence that a fallible person is doing this in front of you, now. We are starting to crave the crack.
The verification side is being built too. Leica shipped a camera in 2023 that cryptographically signs every photo at the moment of capture, so a viewer can later confirm nothing was fabricated. I suspect the technology matters less than whether anyone bothers to check. Van Meegeren fooled the experts partly because everyone wanted a new Vermeer to exist.
The part I'm least sure about
Here is the honest concession. Stated preferences and revealed preferences diverge, and they seem to diverge hardest on exactly this topic. People say they would never want machine-made art or machine-made care, then stream algorithmic playlists all day and are genuinely moved by them. Maybe large stretches of daily life simply go synthetic and most people, most of the time, are fine. If that happens, realness does not disappear as a value; it does something narrower than my headline suggests. It becomes a niche luxury, like handmade shoes: real human attention for those who can pay, fluent simulation for everyone else. I would rather be wrong about that part, and I might not be.
Turning it inward
The inner kind of authenticity gets harder in the same world, and here the question stops being economic. Everyone now maintains a version of themselves that is partly composed, online and in rooms, and the composing keeps getting easier and better assisted. What I notice in myself is that the boundary is blurry from the inside. I cannot always tell which of my reactions are mine and which are learned bits I run because they land well. I doubt that makes me unusual.
So I don't have a tidy instruction to end on. The nearest thing I have found is a habit: occasionally checking, in small ways, whether the thing I am expressing is actually there. Sometimes the answer is no. That is uncomfortable, and worth knowing anyway, because in a world filling up with fluent imitations of feeling, running that check on yourself may turn out to be a practical skill rather than a spiritual nicety. It is at least the one part of all this that does not depend on what the market decides to do.