The Death of Plagiarism

It matters to you. Does it matter to everyone else?

A few years ago, somewhere in the free-flowing and seemingly endless spiral of 2016 American Politics, a particular quote was rolled out endlessly: Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, it is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It was credited to a range of figures of different inspirational beats: Nelson Mandela, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr, and most would also know it from the film Coach Carter, where the entire passage was lifted entirely (without credit).

Of course, it was none of these people who first decided to put all of those words down on paper. Instead, those are the words of self-help guru, writer, poet, and one-time attempted Democratic nominee for President, Marianne Williamson. Which is funny. And there are countless examples of similar quotes with similar ideas all attributed to similar people, and without much of a critical lens from the general public on who said it first or came up with it before anyone else. Which is not to say that Marianne Williamson should not be appreciated for creating something that has clearly touched so many people, but it is a moment that I have found myself thinking about, regularly, as the news cycle begins to reckon with the reality of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on the media industry at large.

Mostly, though, it has me thinking about plagiarism, and how something can be so clearly wrong and unethical and against the exploration of creative fields and intelligence, while also being something that – perhaps – many people simply do not care about.

Last week, tech media brand CNET was the first to step into the firing line. The company announced it would pause publishing content written with AI tools because a lot of it featured plagiarism.

It was just another in a years-long list of media brands trying to reckon with a technology that the Corporate Factors of each business clearly identify as possibly lucrative and game-changing, but who were not sure just how to do all of that in a way that still delivers for the general public, still makes money, and doesn’t cause a public relations nightmare, largely spurred on by their journalists and staff who have responded to all of this with the incredibly understandable position of: What????

Just earlier, BuzzFeed announced it would be using AI to create quizzes and other forms of content across its many brands. In the space of 24 hours, its stock has gone up 150%. That is as telling as these things get.

Plagiarism is ugly and gross and has haunted most creative fields for eternity. Often, it impacts entire industries greatly and with a rippling effect, and in other cases — and with enough marketing spin — it can instead be heralded as remix culture, or a new approach to an old format. One of the biggest bands releasing music right now is The 1975. Its frontman, Matt Healy, has spoken openly about how he has created multiple songs as an homage to already existing classics from another band, LCD Soundsystem. It is not plagiarism to take a few notes here, a few words there. It is riffing. Books are made of other books, music is made of other music, and content is made of content. How you feel about all of that is up to you. Compare this and this, and then listen to this, too. None of this is new. The Strokes built a whole career off of ripping off Tom Petty. People don’t seem to care all that much.

And that, I guess, is where the idea of plagiarism in certain types of media — particularly those which are regular and daily and perhaps somewhat productised in their creation — gets sticky. The people who (rightfully) care about plagiarism the most are the gatekeepers of creativity, and it is important that they have a role to play, if not the largest role to play. But I think the next decade of AI-infiltrated creation will challenge the media industry’s acceptance of what its audience wants. And it will not always be pretty.

And it is entirely possible that while you care about that, and all of those things are true, the vast majority of people in the world do not. Because the idea of plagiarism as lazy theft and the enemy of creativity is all true, but it is also an emphasis from the writers and directors and musicians who make up the majority of what we read and watch and hear, but who do not even come close to the majority of people who actually, in their day-to-day lives, read and watch and listen. And this overwhelming majority are the ones who, ultimately, are the consumers of media, and they are the ones who, ultimately, will determine if they are happy or unhappy with the implementation of any type of artificial intelligence or algorithmic curation. And so the question “will AI take all the jobs in media?” becomes “will anyone care?”

Truthfully, if all the ego is parked and the passionate I Am An Artist mantra is checked at the door, many of us should come to terms with the fact that to many people, our jobs don’t matter, and to many others, neither does what we do for the way the world works.

Think for a moment of the 30-something-year-old white collar worker, who is in a job that they enjoy only enough to get them through to the end of each day, whose approach to the formalities of the work grind, and office culture, is to check a series of boxes endlessly until they die. And in the morning they wake up earlier than they want to, put on clothing they don’t feel comfortable in, and walk into their kitchen rubbing their eyes, blindly turning on the coffee machine, so that a few minutes later they can pour out some of the most lonely, uninspired, brown and bitter water into a mug with the words “Get This Bread” scrawled in red, faded block lettering on it’s side, and it no longer has any of the initial beauty of caffeine in it and has largely become a routine and a habit more than a stimulant or desire.

And they stand there thinking about the day ahead, feeling the coffee coat the back of their tongue like oil, and they turn on the television for ten minutes, if they’re lucky, because they have to leave their small, one bedroom apartment that is sandwiched between hundreds of other apartments built exactly just like it, so that they can walk to the bus stop and get onto the bus alongside dozens of other equally tired and unemotional people who all have similar lives and morning routines.

And they watch the television for the same reason they drink the coffee — not because it is better or good or even useful, but because it works with the life they have built for themselves — and that early in the morning all that is programmed is the monotonous but clearly useful and beloved daily show we can consciously call “Breakfast TV”, a sort of gross and pure version of capitalist media that is scalable; a productised version of newscasting that is so successful in format and so triggering of the right emotional buttons that it exists in almost every corner of the Earth, in different languages and different concepts, but all with the goal of helping the mass population feel decent and comfortable and as if they are not completely disconnected from everything happening in the world.

And they sip on their coffee and watch the same hair-sprayed and fake-tanned news readers, who for some reason are always dressed like they also have white-collar jobs, and all they want is to know what is happening in the world and who it is happening to. They don’t care so much about where the information was sourced, or even if it is particularly useful — what they want is to feel like they have tried, and that they have not completely given in to a system that has already formatted their weekly routine, and controlled where they live, and decided on the people they see every day and the ways they can spend their money, which is, after all, why they do all of this anyway.

That is the person who is the audience, and that is the person who ultimately makes the decision of whether to care about plagiarism at all.

And you may say that all of this is defeatist, and that we should all care about plagiarism, and that it is perhaps one of the most heinous realities of the creative industry, and to not stomp it into the ground on First Sight would be a disservice to the creative industries. And all of that would be true. In fact, it would be more than true, because as anyone who has engaged with these early forms of potentially plagiarist artificial intelligence machines would tell you, the writing is also just Not Very Good, often writes in circles, and regularly hits at you somewhere between the crescent of useful and uncanny valley. But it also doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that the people who wake up every day looking to feel as if they are trying will still be able to feel that way if the methods of effort come from a robot, rather than an autonomous person with their own beliefs and own opinions and own loves and deep, suppressed opinions. And that, I think, is likely.

Journalists will point towards Artificial Intelligence as trying to replace something that cannot be replaced, because that is the easiest way to deal with the fact that the thing, potentially, is you. And none of this is fair or easy or right, but no one said it would be.

In I, Robot, the early Will Smith film about robots and artificial intelligence that was also largely a commercial for the Audi TT — perhaps one of the fastest car models to sway from cool to uncool in human history — Smith’s character, a police officer, is investigating a robot whose owner has been murdered. He looks at this thing, a plasticine, transluscent shell of a human skeleton, with disgust.

“Can a robot write a symphony?” He asks. “Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?”

The robot scans up quickly, itself voided of the needed for brain processing, and responds:

“Can you?”

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