Losing Our Voice? Generative AI and the Degradation of Human Expression

This paper examines the implications of generative AI (GenAI) emulating human expression, i.e. human communication and human creative expression. While GenAI seems to offer benefits such as increased efficiency and productivity, its use raises significant practical and conceptual concerns: GenAI comes with the increased efforts of prompting, verification and editing, and causes the deskilling of its users. It also comes at a monetary cost and causes various ethical issues e.g., a lack of authenticity. We further show that GenAI’s fundamental issue is that it is by design not able to output human expression but only human-like expression. Using AI for tasks that are fundamentally about communicating is replacing communication with something that is not communication. Finally, we show that the consequences of the use of GenAI cannot be avoided on an individual level by those individuals avoiding the use of GenAI and will necessarily lead to an erosion of human expression in general. This is because GenAI: will lead to a distrust in human expression when the authenticity of authorship over time becomes unclear; will cause a devaluation of human expression when human expression can be mimicked with less effort by GenAI; and, will discourage human expression altogether when GenAI has set the bar too high.