Merriam-Webster Dictionary – Wikipedia
The Merriam-Webster dictionary picked just about the most perfect word imaginable for its Word of the Year 2023: And that word is “authentic.”
This is so fitting considering the world in which we live today. A man who dismissed all criticisms and proof of his misdeeds as “fake news” and whose people spike of “alternative facts” just might once again become President of the United States.
This is a man who claims – to this day – that the 2020 Presidential election in America was stolen from him. And this is in spite of the growing evidence that he himself knew that his claims of election fraud were baseless.
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So, to say that this man is not authentic would be an understatement.
And then there are all of the AI produced materials out there. There are fake people made up with millions of followers on social media. Where in the past real people photoshopped their images to look better and slimmer, now we have models and others created entirely by computers.
Schools are having a really tough time knowing whether their students are presenting their own authentic work or if they had it made up using services like ChatGTP.
As you are reading this, you may be thinking the same thing about who actually wrote this story.
This is why both the actors’ and writers’ unions went on strike this year; to stop the movie studios from replacing them with computer programs that use AI.
This may be why Merriam-Webster saw a huge increase in searches for this word.
As Merriam-Webster explains, “authentic” has a number of meanings including “not false or imitation,” a synonym of real and actual; and also “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.”
“Although clearly a desirable quality, authentic is hard to define and subject to debate—two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary,” said Merriam-Webster.
Merriam-Webster’s editor at large Peter Sokolowski told AP, “We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity. What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”
If the people at the dictionary wanted to go the negative route, it could have chosen any one of a number of antonyms for the word “authentic.” These include: false, fake, synthetic, artificial, phony… the list goes on.
