The Stuff We're Made Of
Why human provenance is the only thing AI can't replicate
Social media is confused about AI. X thinks it will transform the world. Reddit thinks it will end the world. LinkedIn wants you to know ten surprising things founders get wrong about it. And Substack tells you how the seeds of AI were planted during a conversation between obscure intellectuals in a salon sidebar on the fringes of the second world war in a town outside of Lyon in Vichy France.
Writing about AI feels like writing about oxygen. Or Taylor Swift. The sujet du jour, omnipresent, necessary, transformative, boring. Oxygen is the perfect analogy, actually: AI sucks all the oxygen out of the room, and it feels like nothing else is worth writing about.
If a large object were on a collision course with Earth, we’d write about it endlessly too: is it an asteroid or aliens? Are they friendly? Did Mary Magdalene see anyone buried on it?
The AI asteroid is forcing us to come to grips with the nature of ourselves. We are biological machines. We have certain physical and intellectual capabilities. And we’re building other machines, wildly different in their internal function, yet capable of replicating and exceeding human capabilities in some areas.
But these machines are not Humanity 2.0. They are not a pure upgrade across all dimensions. If two machines differ wildly in their internal structure, it follows that their outputs will differ wildly at least some of the time. The fact that we can get the output to match over some domain of inputs is unremarkable. A fan can blow air, and so can a human (quite a lot of hot air in my case.) A monkey can eat a banana, and so can a human. Claude Code can write a C++ function, and so can a human.
In the limit, the mere existence of a human’s internal structure is itself an output — in the mind of an observer — and it’s one the AI will never be able to replicate. And if it did, it would cease to be AI and start being human. Put that thing out the airlock.
One could argue internal structure matters to us far more than output. Output is commoditized. We value the burial site of a person who once was more than a living person who looks the same, or makes the same jokes. We value an original painting, even badly damaged, more than a technically superior copy of it.
As copies go, we are often more impressed by attempts to replicate not just the output but the internal state. Daniel Day-Lewis is arguably famous because of how he produced the output he did — by carefully and obsessively curating his internal state to match the human he intended to copy — as much as for the output itself.
We assign an almost supernatural quality to internal structure as it relates to human beings. Even though every molecule that constituted her was ordinary, that specific configuration was unique. And if we could somehow reconstruct her exactly, it still wouldn’t be her. Humans extend this supernatural quality to objects too: The Shroud of Turin, Hemingway’s typewriter, Anne Frank’s diary, your ex’s t-shirt.
The supernatural quality is really an experience in the mind of the observer. There is nothing objectively special about these people and their objects except the degree to which other human minds assign value to them. But why do we care about The Shroud of Turin and not my bedsheets, about her and not that person just like her.
Modern marketing already knows what we value: one of a kind, limited supply, never before seen, beachfront, exclusive, rare opportunity.
We value scarcity. Uniqueness is the ultimate scarcity. And humans and their creations are the ultimate uniqueness. You cannot replicate a human being. We’re one of a kind — except twins, and we have a certain fascination with them. And even our machine creations are relatively simple and easy to replicate compared to us. Every copy of a machine is identical for all practical purposes.
AIs operating in a marketplace shared with humans will learn to value scarcity too. So in a world of abundant AI output, human provenance will still be valued, perhaps above all else.
People are already in the habit of assigning human provenance to their work. I wrote this essay by hand, I’ll tell you. Would it matter if an AI wrote it? Would the jokes land differently? Would the evidence stop supporting the conclusions? The output would be identical. But it would lack that supernatural quality.
This is the bedrock differentiator of humanity. It’s the stuff we’re made of, literally. The dystopians on Reddit will tell you that your skills will become value-less. But what if the thing each of us already has, our humanity, will become the only thing of value that’s left?
That’s the kind of cringe-inducing conclusion only an AI could write.