Comment by baconbrand

I don’t think it’s a good reason.

I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat.

But… For starters, plagiarism has always been an issue. Even before the internet. Look at Tesla, or Rosalind Franklin. It was an issue on the internet before LLMs showed up. It’s always been trivially easy to copy and paste digital information, and with a little bit of programming to do so at scale. Those weird SEO wordpress blogs with their aggregated/stolen content have been around forever. The web was choked full of plagiarized garbage years before chatgpt was an option or even an idea.

Also consider that the AI machine takes a lot more than your stolen creative output to run. It needs tons of electricity poured into expensive equipment. It’s not clear whether the “stolen data + expensive scientists + expensive graphics cards + metric shittons of electricity” side of the equation is ever going to equal “monthly rate people will pay for access to sort of ok almost sometimes accurate information (a service which has been on offer for free for roughly 2 years and is easy to find for free depending on the company/model/use case)” let alone be lower than it. The plagiarism is not profitable and hopefully unsustainable.

And let’s sit on “access to sort of ok almost accurate information” for a second here. Because I’m pretty sure people looking for this and people looking for a blog written by a real human person who they can build a (parasocial perhaps but still) relationship with and send emails to and follow for more related content are entirely separate demographics. Blog traffic has dropped off because Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was those massive sites, not LLMs, that gutted that part of the internet.

Going back to sustainability, legal challenges to the plagiarism machines do still exist and have traction. The more creators, more bloggers and artists and programmers and more of anyone sharing their stuff online, the more people we have with a very vested stake in ending the plagiarism free for all.

I say get in there, get creating, and get up to some lobbying on the side for good measure. Don’t sit back and let a handful of spoiled nerds and obscenely wealthy old people ruin the joy of creating and sharing things. Maybe drop in more references to baseball bats to make your output less palatable to the monster. I don’t know.