The rate at which artificial intelligence is able to evolve is scary. By casually absorbing content from the Internet, it can seemingly both replicate and synthesise new material for us –evident by the surge of popularity of ChatGPT and how people have grown increasingly reliant on it. However, as content creators and copywriters, should we be worried that AI (or some malicious people misusing the AI) could plagiarise our work and potentially even make money off of it? Or is this just an overreaction? Read on for Wordsmith’s opinion on the matter!
Wait, what’s going on?
Jane Friedman (author, professor at the University of Virginia, publishing expert and featured guest on multiple news outlets) was suddenly messaged by a reader regarding her “new” book – but she hadn’t written a new book. Someone had been passing off AI-generated material using her name and the books were sold on various sites, reports Tiffany Yates Martin of FoxPrint Editorial. Naturally, Friedman contacted the sites to delete the listings, but some sites were less than cooperative. Since she had significant standing in the industry and on social media, she was able to get everything pulled… but this raises two concerns:
· AI has become powerful enough that it can imitate how a particular author writes – and less careful readers may be fooled into believing it to be genuine
· Less influential authors might not be able to convince sites to withdraw falsely-published material (unless the authorities get involved, but then it’d likely be a lengthy process)
The topic of AI theft has also rattled the fanfiction world, with the fanfiction site AO3 reporting that many authors have locked their content to try and avoid AI “scraping”. The site put in countermeasures to only allow registered users to view content, but doing so also severely limits viewership from casual readers – “putting systems in place that attempt to block all scraping would be difficult or impossible without also blocking legitimate uses of the site,” the AO3 announcement said. “With that said, it is an unfortunate reality that anything that is publicly available online can be used for reasons other than its initial intended purposes.”
However, since these scraping bots aren’t particularly good at factchecking or gauging the authenticity of the materials gathered, a group of mischievous authors have created stories based on what they call the “Omegaverse” to trick AIs into using it. Do be warned, the concepts and subcultures behind it are not safe for work!
Are we doomed to be studied and copied?
But let’s say we don’t have the time to intentionally write fake material – and we doubt our clients would like us doing that on their time either – what’s there to do?
If you are an author, Yates Martin recommends signing up for the Authors Guild, which gives legal advice, guidance and is a helpful representative for smaller writers. If you recall the Hollywood strikes that have been going on for much of 2023 involving artificial intelligence and streaming services, the strikes finally paid off recently – showing that guilds and unions can prove to be formidable forces.
However, although marketers and copywriters can technically sign up for the Authors Guild – there are certain restrictions that will disqualify many of us – such as requiring a published book in the US or being a freelance writer with 3+ published pieces or made US$5,000 over the past 18 months. Since we are based in Hong Kong nor have we published anything in the States, we’re out of luck.
There’s also the option of talking to a trademark or IP lawyer, but since marketing work often involves much shorter timelines compared to published books, we imagine the process wouldn’t be quite the same. Since we aren’t lawyers, you’d definitely want to consult professionals if you were to go down this route.
Lastly, if you use ChatGPT or other AI content generators, Yates Martin would advise prudency with all inputted prompts and material, as generated content gets saved and possibly regurgitated to other users – this could be disastrous if you unintentionally feed intellectual property into their archives and starts dispensing it for the world to see!
Given the nature of our business, much of what we do will end up online. Press releases, content marketing, advertising material, content for websites and so forth… these all require online publishing in order to reach audiences quickly and efficiently. This makes it rather counter-productive to try an offline-only approach! As there doesn’t seem to be a lot of definitive actions that copywriters and marketers can take… does that mean we’re doomed to be plagiarised by bots?
While that does seem to be the unfortunate truth, we believe that we don’t need to be as worried about AI theft compared to book authors. Book authors have higher stakes because their livelihoods are dependent on book sales – copywriters and content marketers are different, we rely on paycheques from clients. Secondly, a client’s biggest competitor is with other businesses in the industry. If a client’s competitor were to cheat and use AI to copy/regurgitate content, critics would have a field day tearing apart the competitor’s reputation (especially since online content often includes a publishing date that can determine who did what first).
Furthermore, AI may be good at cobbling together material from different sources, but it still lacks the delicate touch of a human writer. Here’s what Stephen King considers AI writing at the moment:
“[It’s] movie money: good at first glance, not so good upon close inspection.”
That’s because AI writing isn’t able to come up with truly innovative ideas, nor is it able to create intricate details on its own. AI may have expansive databases to work with, but without any personal experiences nor perspectives, it can only recycle and rehash existing material. As with Jane Friedman’s imposter, the AI may be able to replicate her writing style, but true fans of hers will be able to tell the AI’s writing lacks storytelling and inventiveness.
AI may eventually be a threat to all writers, but we believe its logarithms and creativity processes still need time to grow before it can replace us and the work we create. Hopefully by then, laws and regulations will be in place to better protect us from digital plagiarism – so we shouldn’t need to be too worried about robot writers… yet!