#plagiarism is not the problem

[the-moon-loves-the-sea]

Shared here today by Matthew Boroson on Facebook. (ETA: Gaining inspiration from other authors is great. Lifting passages and avoiding giving credit isn’t.)

Tanith Lee was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel, for the second book of the Flat Earth series. She died in 2015. You can buy Tales From the Flat Earth here and here .

[nokingsonlyfooles]

If we don't stop calling it "Artificial Intelligence" it's going to kill us!

Raise your hand, please, if you can tell the difference between a machine that is incapable of thought - including value judgments, resistance, emotion and innovation - and a human being with agency. I'm not talking about the quality of the work just yet, but the quality of the worker.

There are products that don't need much in the way of innovation. If you find the most efficient way to screw a cap on a toothpaste tube, a machine can replicate that perfectly until another human being comes up with a more efficient way, or forever. It's a loss for unskilled labour, but there are very few people out there who are passionate about screwing caps on tubes. As long as we have enough to live on, we'd choose a more entertaining occupation.

But there is no most efficient way to do art. Art is a silly thing some large-brained apes started doing to express themselves and feel joy - the part where someone slaps a price tag on it and sells it came much later. "I want to experience joy and self-expression with maximum efficiency so I can go do something else" is a batshit thing for a human being to say. And that's not what these learning algorithms do at all.

What "AI" does - and very well! - is produce a product that can be consumed and sold. Do you want to see John Oliver marry a cabbage? Well, you can generate that image with a few keystrokes now, and look at it, and throw it away, and forget it. Most art gets consumed and forgotten these days, maybe it always has, so I understand the impulse. Joy is fleeting. Corporations have gone to human artists to make their consumable, forgettable ads and designs and franchises in the past, and are continuing to do so for the moment, but we forget, that's not what art is for. That's just how it's forced to pay for itself and justify its existence in capitalist society.

Fanfiction is the opposite of that. It can't be sold. (If you want to sell it, you have to file off all the serial numbers and divorce it from its fandom, uncreating it from its original incarnation.) People create fanfic because they love their blorbos and they want to see more of them. They are legend-making like the storytellers of old, gathered around a digital fireplace with room for everyone in our huge, diverse society to sit and warm themselves. They are putting in incredible amounts of work for no pay, only for love. (I wish like hell they didn't have to do it with "intellectual properties" selected for maximum profitability, but that's a-whole-nother problem.)

A learning algorithm can't even have a fucking idea, let alone love it enough to rattle out 150,000 words and share them on AO3. It can only remix what thinking, feeling, human beings have already thought and felt, in response to input from another human being. Hell, even "John Oliver marries a cabbage" came from a human brain that only chose AI as a tool to create it in image form.

And there's the hell of it. OP is so close! "AI plagiarizes just as much as any human creator" == true! "So leave it alone!" =/= true! No! Because it's not human. It doesn't eat, it doesn't sleep, it doesn't think. It can't say "no" or "let's try it another way" or "I think that's beautiful" and really mean it, because it doesn't understand any of those things. It's only parroting what we've fed into it, it can't make anything new. Art without human innovation is stagnation - not self expression or joy.

If we stop paying human beings enough to devote themselves to art, art will suffer, and so will we all. If we were all getting enough money to eat and keep creating, this AI thing would be a non-issue. It would be just another fun tool, like a digital brush set or a camera. But that's not how our dumb society sees it.

Corporations hate having to pay fragile, erratic human beings to do anything. They will stop buying real art from real people and happily crank out disposable products all day - and maybe some people will buy them, and not see any difference. Please believe me, there is a difference. Artists matter. You matter.

Guarantee everyone the support to live and keep creating, and give everyone a platform and credit for their work, and I'll let you feed my work into AIs all day long. I'd be curious to see what happens! But until that day, no. Fuck off. Artists are already hurting because of this. I will not help you put me or them out of a job, and I am withholding my consent. I am a human being with emotional and physical needs and I cannot be replaced with an algorithmic average of other human beings. And fuck you for even trying.

The definition of "plagiarism" and "copying" being changed from "copying verbatim someone else's work" to "creating an entirely new never-seen-before piece of work with input from a tool that may have at one point read metadata about someone else's work" is such insane obvious batshit overreach, but people are repeating it as if it's a given just because it gives them a reason to hate the fucking machines.

So done with this conversation. After a year of trying to explain this stuff to people nicely I am just completely done with it.

[hinamie]

obligatory water tribe alt outfits so i am not held liable if they freeze

jjk atla!au with @philosophiums

[swadloom]

"Smaller flights are better at Dominance" actually statistical error. Earthflight Georg, who lives under a pillar & exalts 10,000 dragons each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

[autumnwhistles]

(ft synthesised voice, also this isn't quite the start of the song but it works better as an excerpt)

[sukirichi]

PLEASE STOP COPYING FICS ‼️

I am by no means gatekeeping concepts or tropes. We all know that it’s normal to see the same tropes or AUs be used differently, and that is not plagiarism. However, I recently found a fic that was oddly similar to my old (and discontinued) Gojo x Reader series, Reckless. The CEO! Gojo is nothing new, and neither is an accidental pregnancy trope. The only reason I am concerned is because this Gojo series I found has the exact same themes as Reckless that consists of: a playboy CEO Gojo with a very notorious reputation, a poor reader who is an employee and asset to the company (someone who works closely with Gojo), reader getting knocked up from a one night stand with Gojo, reader with a seemingly dead/absent mother yet still in contact with her father, Gojo with a very traditional family who does not like reader, and Gojo with an ex he struggles to let go of - which are all elements of Reckless.

The first chapter of that Gojo fic is also eerily similar to my first chapter with the same flow of: YN finding out she’s pregnant and her friend being there for her, Gojo saying he’ll take responsibility because ‘they both made the baby’, YN having to move in with Gojo to take care of the baby, and both of them coming to a mutual agreement that their ‘relationship’ will be purely for the baby’s benefit. The flow of events and specific details about the characters’ backgrounds are too similar to mine.

Again, I am not gatekeeping concepts, just as how I’ve had other writers ask me if they could write their own stories or takes based off of the NAOYA’S TROPHY WIFE COLLECTION or the BONTEN HUSBANDS EXCLUSIVE, and I’m fine with that. I’m even happy people are inspired by what I write. But being inspired is completely different from taking someone’s story and posting it as yours. Please trust your own creativity and skills in writing. You can write amazing stories and have people love them without having to steal from others.

It’s sad to say this is not the first time I, and other writers, have been plagiarized. It’s even more upsetting to know that a friend of mine who has also written a Gojo series (that I’m sure you all know and dearly love) experiences the same issues with the same person. The fact that this is happening to many writers out there is disheartening. We work hard and pour a lot of love in the stories we create. None of us are getting paid for this, and we simply want to share our passions with others. So please, let us be kinder with one another and show love and support the right way. If you love a fic, you give feedback and rb/comment + show support to the writer. You don’t steal their ideas and play it off as your own because you liked it.

[nerdby]

If you support AI ANYTHING after reading about this then you are trash.

[chuluoyi]

it’s really beyond me how subposting is still a recurring event in this hellsite — but i’ll say it once again: if you don’t like what i write or what i do in my own blog, then kindly leave or block me. mutuals or not, i won’t care a shit. you don’t go subposting or spreading hate. that’s highly immature behavior befitting a child :)

i don’t know if it isn’t obvious already, but i spent lots and lots of time rethinking while writing my fics. most of the time it takes weeks or months. whether i’m basing it on a manhwa or not, i spent a lot of time thinking and writing it—for months even—so if you don’t even read it and just label it as if i just plagiarized it in one go… it actually makes me so upset

just… be peaceful pls. if you don’t like it, then block me. it’s so simple if you think about it like a mature adult. unless you’re incapable to. thank you

[muzansfangs]

PLAGIARISM ON TELEGRAM.

Disheartened, I once again have been victim of plagiarism on another platform. It has been brought to my attention that the owner of a channel on TELEGRAM has been ‘copying, pasting and translating’ works from various authors who publishes on Tumblr. Unfortunately, I do not have telegram, but a kind person has provided me the following screenshots in which, as you can read, the account named EPIPHANY has been sharing some of my Bleach works without my consent. I specify that I have NEVER BEEN CONTACTED BY ACCOUNTS ASKING ME TO TRANSLATE MY WORKS, OR RE-POST THEM.

I am annoyed, honestly. It’s the second time someone does this to me and I am still bittered from last year’s experience. Please, help us writers to have some justice. The owner of the telegram account has apparently blocked a lot of admins trying to stop them. Taking screenshots is banned as well, but please… Let’s do something about it.

I don’t spend hours of my free time writing for someone else to share my contents without my consent. The audacity some people have is appalling.

— Luce is asking for your help

These are the screenshots I have received:

Tagging some friends and accounts who might be involved, considering the fandoms they write for: @doumadono @seireiteihellbutterfly @tired-writer04 @bleach-your-panties @electronicwitchcollection @m-ayo-o @brittscafe

[foxgirltail]

Palworld critiques are looking more and more like Tumblr call-out posts they're all like

Long, drawn out, effective non-issue with several sources/instances

Another non-issue

This one is actually of substance and should be the main point, but it's buried by minor issues of little consequence

Another non-issue

[touteytout]

i know spite is not a. sustaining thing to be motivated by But anytime i see a ""real"" artist (someone who actually knows how to draw and knows what goes into making a drawing) use genAI for inspiration/reference/at any other point in their process, it motivates me like nothing else to just draw. not anything in particular, just drawing for the sake of it. like i dont understand how, as an artist, you dont enjoy the basic things about drawing. just do something else at that point

[blujayonthewing]

when you put aside all the ethical issues, I'd respect AI art a lot more if the people making it were actually leaning into the bizarre dreamlike output instead of breathlessly insisting that it looks SO good SO realistic and it's gonna REVOLUTIONIZE ART, BRO and trying to use it to make Normal Children's Books and Normal Marketable Advertising Art

[weirdcat1213]

i think ive said this before but you can tell somerton never went to uni cuz otherwise he would have plagiarism as one of his top 5 fears

[revlogdump]

Once again, this is unrelated to the original propose of this blog but

As someone who has memory issues, disociative amnesia at that, and does have issues similar to James in the sense of "I forget where I got this info from"

Search your history and copy paste every single website you visit about the topic, you can weed it out later

Simple as that, just copy down all the urls in another place, weed it out as you go, need something to do but have no energy to write? Weed that list out

I swear to fucking everything

[accoochtrement]

AI opt-out instructions for visual learners

Step one: click on pancake icon for menu.

Step two: Click on view blog. (Do not just click on blog)

Step three: click on blog settings

Step four: Scroll all the way down to visibility. Click on it. Then click opt-out of third party sharing.

AI isn't ok. Opting out of this can't prevent all of your work from being used in AI training but it can help. You deserve to not have your work stolen and so do others. AI is stolen work. Don't support it.

[sp4ceboo]

rant but im a bit scared im going to get attacked