AI: The Plagiarism Engine

Bring back the footnote

Last week, my podcast partner Eugene S. Robinson sent me a link to an article that sounded a lot like content we’ve done on The Bad Boss Brief. My first thought was that plenty of people write about bad bosses, and the idea that more than one person can come up with a similar concept in a similar time frame is not hard to swallow.

Except, AI. AI scrapes everything, indiscriminately, including, I assume, everything I put here on Substack. Like a vacuum sucking up all the words from all the people and then spitting out bits and flakes in a content sausage. Many people are fine with taking that sausage and throwing it into the stew of their self-promotion, content or writing.

It’s one thing to pretend that your bad LinkedIn post was written by you rather than AI, and have people dissect your use of punctuation or lists. But it is another to take fully baked concepts or arguments and claim them as your own because the AI genie gave them to you and, look, it’s magic. It is our job to vet the ideas AI spits out to us and give credit where credit is due.

AI is, essentially, a plagiarism engine. I use AI to find the events, podcasts or publications I want to use to promote my upcoming book. And it’s helpful. I’m not anti-AI. But I find it frustrating when authors or artists or content creators pull indiscriminately from the AI sausage fountain and then throw up their hands when they’re caught and trot out the old idea that more than one person can come up with a similar concept in a similar time frame.

Which feels to me like copying off the test paper of the kid next to you in school and saying it’s not cheating because you don’t know the kid’s name. The disingenuous assertion that using AI deletes your personal responsibility not to steal someone else’s work is bullshit.

I don’t use AI in my writing. Not here, not in my book. Ever. If you do, here’s a simple suggestion. If AI spits out a great phrase or resonant term of art all you have to do is pop it in a search bar and see what comes up. If that fragment of IP was part of someone else’s original hard work, just credit them. The same way you would if you were writing an academic paper and used someone else’s idea. The footnote of grace, the nod to the people who came before you, the humble acceptance of your influences, all in a floating number next to a word that guides your eyes to the tiny print at the bottom of the page that says, “here’s where that came from.” Bring back the footnote.

I was interested in the controversy over Mel Robbins’ book “Let Them”, which I first saw in Sage Justice’s Substack. If Robbins, or anyone who worked for her or her publisher, had bothered to search the term “Let Them”, they would have found the poem written by Cassie Phillips that got lots of attention online years before Robbins’ book. A simple acknowledgement in Robbins’ book that this woman wrote a poem called “Let Them” with the same ideas Robbins used would have been sufficient. Artists get inspired by other people’s work. I am writing this in response to Sage Justice’s piece. But I’m saying where my inspiration came from and linking to her work. Because that’s what you do.

Analog plagiarism is a drag. We know that. I worked at an ad agency once and wrote an article about a process I had developed around business development. My boss, the owner of the agency, told me not to publish it because it would be revealing our secret sauce. When I left that agency and started consulting, I used that same process extensively with clients, and they liked it. It had name. It was catchy. People knew it was mine.

Imagine my surprise when I opened a business publication and saw my article. With my boss’s name attached. He didn’t even bother to change it much. Technically, he did own it, as work product I did when I worked for him. But I assumed he would at least credit me. He did not. If he’d given me a reference, just name checked me, I would have been fine. But he did not. When I wrote to him about it, he hotly denied stealing my work and was shocked, shocked, that I would unjustly accuse him. Does he think I don’t keep copies of my work?

AI plagiarism is just as damaging, only we’re pretending it’s not. Maybe it’s because it is relatively new. I’m old enough to remember a time before mobile phones. And the years after when people, unused to the new technology, would forget to silence their phones. Phones were constantly ringing and pinging in movie theaters, churches, meetings, speeches. Extensive and repeated admonitions to silence your phones abounded. Now we’ve more or less learned to quiet our phones in spaces where silence is appropriate. Once in a while, sure, someone forgets. But they quickly and shamefacedly reach for their device and silence it. They don’t pretend like the device shouted on its own. This idea that we’re not responsible for AI, we’re not obligated to spend seventeen seconds checking what it spits out to see if it belongs to someone else and we need to employ the footnote of goodwill is possibly a cultural adjustment to a new technology. But AI isn’t new, and this is happening more and more.

AI is not a genie in a bottle for writers. As of now, it is someone else’s words, ideas and concepts repackaged for you. It can be helpful and if it stimulates your creativity and you build something new on top of that, you’ll be like the rest of the writers who are influenced by the work of others. In the past we had to read work we knew and identified as originating elsewhere. And there was a cultural and ethical understanding that if you stole those words without attribution, that was plagiarism. Which is a bad thing.

Plagiarism is still a bad thing. AI is just a collection of other people’s ideas with the identifying marks ripped off. You know that. Don’t pretend you don’t. Take a beat, throw it in a search bar, and credit the person who made it first, the hard way, word by painstaking word.