Who’s Really Speaking?

 The dishes are tailored to the chef’s personal culinary evolution but come prefabricated and require nothing more than a steam or water bath to serve. The company provides anything the chef can dream up – but not a single ingredient has ever grown naturally. The meat? Lab-grown. The butter? Synthetic. The olive oil? Petroleum-based. The parsnips are flavoured industrial starch. The fer­mented cabbage was created without a trace of biological relevance. And yet, everything tastes amazing. It looks even better.

Now picture this: the refined French wine you splurged on to celebrate your daughter’s graduation – the one reserved to celebrate special moments and which holds precious memories – what if that bottle has never, in its entire existence, seen a vineyard, let alone French soil. Instead, what the sommelier brings is a wine synthetically blended to perfection by an advanced Californian wine-­mixology machine. Everything is balanced to the nanogram: alcohol, tartaric, malic, citric and succinic acids; magnesium, calcium, potassium and iron for minerality; ketones, phenols, aldehydes and floral terpenes. To mimic oak, ellagitannins are added. Instead of real yeast, a dose of polysaccharides. It tastes, smells and looks just like your refined, expensive French wine.

And now, think of this: you’re looking forward to a relaxing massage at your favourite hotel spa. The massage feels amazing, the masseur’s voice is calming and their rhythm and pressure are perfect. But your eye mask isn’t on quite right. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice that a masseur isn’t even in the room. Instead, a highly sophisticated robotic arm is doing all the work...

I’ll spare you the rest – you understand what I am getting at. If your partner writes you a lovely intimate message and your boss or business partner sends a long, personal email – but you notice those telltale signs that only ChatGPT could leave behind –wouldn’t you feel a bit... hurt? Like, am I worth so little that they couldn’t take the time to write something themselves? Do they even mean what they said – or are these charming phrases just cardboard-­cutout sentences no human ever actually wrote?

Words hold a power far beyond the mere stringing together of letters to deliver information. Words create reality. They can echo across millennia, still resonating whenever someone reads them anew. There’s a reason the saying goes In the beginning was the Word. Every sentence, every text carries more than just its core message – it transmits thoughts, feelings and a fragment of the sender’s personality.

But. Only if a human mind has first formed and shaped those words and if a human voice or hand has delivered them. Only then can another human, at the receiving end, truly hear or read and understand them. Otherwise, words are... nothing. At least, nothing with class.

Words Katarina Kovalska