Given Under My Hand and Spoken in My Voice

When I was in the Marine Corps when we went to promotion or award ceremonies, one thing that I remember is that many of the proceedings ended with a phrase: "Given under my Hand."[1] This phrase is a seal of authenticity, a guarantee that the presenter has both the authority and confirmation assurance that the contents are genuine and true. In this age of generative AI, we find that technological acceleration and advancement is rapidly improving our ability to synthesize ideas and create and learn. One challenge in this New World is that machine generated content is unable to reproduce uniqueness and emotion.

I have found that dictation is a very useful tool, at least for me in realizing my thoughts onto a recorded medium. Sometimes it's faster than typing. Sometimes it's slower than typing, and either case it's much better than my handwriting but importantly, it is my voice. Research into model autophagy disorder (MAD) [2] shows that we still need uniquely generated human content as we go forward in the world. 'Authenticity is the New Oil' as recently declared by an author [3] [4], whom I have forgotten their name, but will annotate in the footnotes of this article.

I therefore propose a new and old standard, that all completely human generated content, signed with a declaration as a voluntary measure but this declaration is a watermark that the work was that of a single individual at a fixed point of time. I am both typing and writing this article on my MacBook. I have not used generative AI in the authorship of this article. I will be signing this letter as such.

Given under my hand and spoken in my voice on this 23rd day of February 2024,

Jeffrey Samuel Schulman Junior

References:

[1] Given under my hand on … definition. (n.d.). Law Insider. https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/given-under-my-hand-on

[2] Alemohammad, S., Casco-Rodriguez, J., Luzi, L., Humayun, A. I., Babaei, H., LeJeune, D., Siahkoohi, A., & Baraniuk, R. G. (2023). Self-consuming generative models go MAD. In arXiv [cs.LG]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01850

[3] Choi, W. J. (2024, February 22). Authenticity is the new oil. William Jay Choi - Be You. Earn More. Live Free; William Jay Choi. https://williamjaychoi.com/newsletter/authenticity-is-the-new-oil/

[4] Redwine, S. and Granger, D. (Oxford Road [@OxfordRoad]. 2023, December 18). MRT clip: Authenticity - the new oil in audio’s AI era. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYw15Su8Nf0