The closer you stay to emotional authenticity and people, character authenticity, the less you can go wrong.

(David O. Russell)

When I was little, we used to play a game we called "Little Secrets" in the yards of our apartment blocks. We would dig a small, shallow hole in the soil, fill it with leaves, buttons, and pieces of foil, and then carefully cover it with a piece of glass. After topping it with a layer of earth, we'd return hours or days later to unearth our creation. The little secrets, now intact, were shining as something precious and genuine. Now, in the era of deepfakes, synthetic personas, and a flood of AI-generated content, I recall that game because humane and genuine content is our new little secret, which is a rare, valuable core of truth hidden beneath layers of digital soil.

The continuous swell of AI-generated content is creating a spectacular, exhausting illusion. I now constantly encounter AI-voiced videos on YouTube, blandly structured AI-created courses, and LinkedIn posts that all follow the same predictable, sterile format, prompting me to desperately search for a real human voice.

Seeing Sora-created videos on TikTok is particularly disturbing; the flawless, synthetic reality feels fundamentally wrong. This constant, canny production threatens to saturate our experience, making us desperately tired of the synthetic. It creates a deep, reflexive hunger for content that is genuinely human, personal, and flawed—the kind of content that, like those childhood treasures, would be our little secrets.

The weight of witness: where authentic emotion lives

I was recently reminded of the irreplaceable nature of human authorship and truth through a moment of serendipity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I was trying to make some selfies in front of a local mosque in Sarajevo when I suddenly heard a friendly male voice ask, "Do you speak English?" I turned and saw a tall man with several books in his hands. That was how I met local writer Nermin Bošnjak. His book, Unbreakable, narrated the perseverance of 17 people who survived the longest siege of a capital city in human history. The book was a profoundly draining experience; I had to read it several times just to process the sheer emotional weight of their losses and their defiant continuation of life’s journey.

While in Sarajevo, I went to see the Museum of Sarajevo under Siege, and I needed time to recover afterwards as it resonated so deeply with me. Before this, only the museum of Karlag—a Gulag in Kazakhstan—impacted me so intensely. The authentic photos of the horror, tragedy, and war crimes, made by human hands, could not leave anyone untouched. These images were real witnesses.

This experience forces the question: Are AI synthetic images capable of evoking our feelings? Our emotions? Anger? Sadness? Despair?

The power of a historical photo or Bošnjak’s words stems from the fact that they are traces of real human presence and pain.

The betrayal of authorship: tool or partner?

The ethical debate at the heart of the digital age is about the integrity of creation. The new tech mantra suggests democratization allows those who lack traditional literary skills to use AI to generate content. This surge in volume, however, immediately raises a profound question:

Who is the author? Is the AI merely a tool, like a calculator, with the human providing the prompt and retaining authorship? Or is it a trustworthy partner, sharing the creative workload and the resulting credit?

This ambiguity matters because the machine is built on probabilities and patterns with no emotions, no bonds, and no memories whatsoever. The essence of the crisis lies not in technical skill, but in soul. Great art is built on that which cannot be quantified: the unique pain, humor, memory, and perspective of a single life.

The core of genuineness: the things that endure

Can AI-written books truly sustain a reader's interest if the reader knows the narrative is a statistical outcome? Would it ever be possible for an AI to evoke the same raw emotion as the author of Unbreakable? The answer seems clear: the power of that book comes from the human soul. A Large Language Model, driven by optimization, can give you a technically perfect description of grief, but it cannot give you the core of that individual human pain.

Furthermore, can AI synthetic images or actors, regardless of their visual or vocal perfection, ever evoke the deepest emotions in our hearts?

Or will their flawlessness only serve to highlight the absence of the messy, unpredictable human heart we truly connect with?

The continuous flood of AI content risks making us desperately tired of the synthetic, amplifying our hunger for the flawed, humorous, and genuinely felt creation that can only come from a human being.

We are entering a new reality where the sheer volume of dazzling, yet often hollow, AI production threatens to overshadow the simple honesty of human creation. As the spectacle of the digital façade grows, we will find ourselves desperately seeking those things that are real, flawed, and truly our own.

The question remains: as the synthetic content floods the market, will we find, and cherish, those remaining core of humane and genuine content that are our little secrets?