AI Is Stealing Your Work

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Good Monday morning and welcome back to another initiative. To no buddies who know nothing with myself and Robert Watson. What's happening, Robert?

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Happy Monday. I thought we would talk about plagiarism in AI, given the fact that the Cambridge professor, ex-professor, had taken his life, and his uh resignation letter was considered 100% AI written. And it's creating a scandal in academia and a scandal in the book writing business. And it's uh yeah, it's presented us with many challenges.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

AI it seems like it's gonna be like there's so many nuances with this thing that it's gonna be a nightmare for everyone because it's learning so fast, it can do all these things, it's starting to realize that like you know, you can sit there and I use it, I use it myself, but what I do is I typically type out and write out everything that I want it to say, and then I say, make this sound better. Make it sound not like a redneck wrote it, or you know, like not like me, because when when I say things, when I talk to people, it's funny because everyone always kind of takes things a little, because I'm very to the point with a lot of things, and some people will take it the wrong way. That's why I hate text messages. I think we've talked about this before, but I I had a text exchange with my employer one day, and he was like, Well, you don't have to give me attitude. And I'm like, Where did you get that? Where did you find attitude in my conversation? Because there was no attitude. It's just with text, you know how it always is, there's no inflection in your voice, you don't know what's going on, you don't know where it's coming from. And if you just look straight at it and say, Man, I've already said it three times, it that sounds a lot different than I've already sin it three times. You know, like, and you don't get that, you don't pick that up from words, right? And so I'll go through and I'll write out some letter or something. I'll have a customer who has an issue with something and I want to make it sound like I'm not a dick. And I will say, make this sound a little bit nicer.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

True. So uh I'm in the uh odd position of both being an academic, a writer, published, and I also work for one of the major AI companies, fixing their what's called AI slop. In other words, how to basically critique the AI about how it writes to be more human or less AI, let's put it this way. Let's just go with less AI. And so I'm I'm on all sides of the issue. And human writing has everybody has a voice in their head, like you say, your voice is uh a dick, as you put it, right? Okay, but that's your voice, right? And so, you know, everybody has a voice, and so uh the AI is an aggregator, so it aggregates and it tends to flourish and it tends to keep subjects in its mind that it doesn't say, and it uses a lot of it's and theirs and that's and and as instead of solid subjects. And when you actually read aloud, oftentimes what AI writes, it doesn't follow, meaning you can't you literally can't follow the conversation. And so it's trying its best to get there. Now on the flip side of this, it's very hard, especially for someone who spells badly and who also uh writes faster than he or thinks faster than he writes. So I tend to leave out ths and that's and twos and as I'm going along. So I'm I was extremely grateful when they had Grammarly, which would basically fix my grammar, which really wasn't the problem. It was little missing words. And I think Grammarly has recorded at this time, it's checked two 20 million of my words to this point. And it and it says you keep doing the same thing, you keep leaving out this, this, and that, and you you occasionally misspell. And I'm like, okay, that's fine. So for AI, for me, spelling and grammar, it just makes mine not look like crap. Right. You know, it doesn't make you sound like a dick, and it makes me not sound illiterate. Um but the reality is is people are offloading creativity to the AI, and that's where this battle is really about. It's not about sentence structure, right? It's not about who makes a better sentence and does it make you sound better one way or the other, or you know, because that's kind of just that's polishing. Right. And what we're really talking about is the creative process and the ideas that are supposed to be human and the fact that people don't have ideas and they're all they're allowing the AI to create to engage that creative process. And that's where the and so this professor was caught uh plagiarizing in his 2015 uh PhD dissertation, which is one of the other nice things about AI is you can actually do plagiarism, you know, reviews. And let me tell you something. For somebody who's done extensive research, there are times when you don't remember where you got something from.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Okay, and it's not like you talked a whole sentence, it's just that you you know, like I can tell you now, like when I write, if there's a comment in there, I can tell you where it came from. The author, the concept is from, but that doesn't mean after I create a 95-page thesis that I remember every single solitary one of them. So I'm extremely grateful for the plagiarism, just in case I miss giving someone credit for an idea that they should have gotten credit for. I'm not trying to steal ideas, I'm basically trying to make sure that everybody gets credit properly for what's being done. That's where my head is all the time. But things do get missed. We're not talking about that issue with this professor. We're talking about entire paragraphs and stuff being lifted out of other people's work. That's the problem, the copy and paste.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

You did say 2015 dissertation. I mean, did he how did how did AI come into play with that when this was from 2015? I mean it didn't.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

It came into play with his uh resignation letter.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Oh, gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Uh so basically he again, I don't have the evidence I didn't do it. Um 2014 or 15 dissertation was plagiarized, and then he did his resignation letter 100% AI.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

And so what that did to everybody, because they consider AI to be plagiarism in academia. So basically he continued plagiarizing according to them. Again, didn't read it, didn't see a 600, didn't know what screens they ran it through. I I don't know how effective they are. But the reality is, is so they're looking at somebody's habit of using other people's work because AI is considered another person now. So you're you know, realizing what they're doing is as they're saying he's continuing to carry on this. But there was another author who uh I think it was last month, had his whole book pulled because I think they ran it through one of the AI detectors, it was 60% AI.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

You know, it's weird to me because this whole scenario, like I think about, and you'll have to tell me if this is because I know you write a lot. I know you write a lot of papers for college and things like that, but they used to have this thing that you'd put it through and it would tell if it was plagiarized. But if they're considering AI another person, and if the person is actually like, so what I would do is I would write a paper and then I would email it to my mother, who is a second set of eyes who wrote a lot of papers as well, and say, Hey, can you spot check this? Tell me what you think, let me know what corrections need to be made, whatever. And then she would go through and she would current the grammar, just like you're saying, like with Grammarly, she'd go through, correct, make sure things flowed the way that they were supposed to, and give me suggestions based on that. You can do that with AI, right? Can't you can't it be the same thing? It's like, hey, here's my paper, spot check this, tell me what you would change. But how do they differentiate between that and actually writing the whole paper? Because if you have AI go through and correct grammar and things like that, is that is that a problem? Is that considered the same thing?

unknown 9:10

No.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

And so the difference is that AI slop, which is what we correct for in my consulting gig, is what I have to deal with is the AI. If I ask it to do anything for me, write me a paragraph on X, right? Deep dive research on X, and it will come back and give me a paragraph. And the paragraph has what I call AI slop in it. They're really simple concepts. It it doesn't carry subjects very well. It tends to use uh overblown words, right? You know, it's got four or five different things that you can find all the time in there. It's vague, it uses words like flexibility and actualize and energize, and you know, words that mean are like fluff words that you use in motivation.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Yeah, it's like when you write it, when you have it write a letter for you, I always like do not say that. Like it'll it'll say like you write it out and it's like uh warm regards. Who the hell ends us ends a letter with warm regards? You know, it's like thank you. Like I go, you need to make this sound like me, not you, you know, and and that's the thing. It's like it's every time you do that, it's like, oh, kind regards or warm regards, and you're like, yeah, no one fucking says that. Why do we have to put this word in there? It's weird.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

Right. And so one of the other things it tends to do, and you can usually see it, is it will take a sentence and it will say, um uh this issue, like uh scholarly issues have a problem with these three things, and it will list the three things in a row and then continue on the sentence and list three other things in the next without ever breaking sentence. It's completely overwritten, completely overnecessary. And so you kind of get used to its uh habits, and so what you're in there trying to do is you're trying to fix words that don't mean anything. So if you and I are talking to each other, we try to be blunt and straightforward, and AI is anything but blunt. Yeah, I see her laughing.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Nikki's saying that she says that, and I'm just like, I have never heard that. Like I until this AI thing came out, like there were there was a guy that I like you could totally tell because he would write to his, like he'd send an email to his customers, and it would be like it'd say like that, and I'd be like, No one talks this way, dude. No one does. And then like he's the same guy, like at the end of the at the end of the phone call, he's like, bye, and you're like, what the hell is this? Like, why would we say this? Like, that's just no one says that. And it's just kind of funny because that was the rolling joke, is like these people say these things, and they're not what normal. I don't know, who's who am I to decide what normal is? But like it's not what you see the most of the time, right? Like it's you see different things that I don't know. Thank you. Sincerely used to be the thing, you know. Love at the end of like if you're writing to someone that, you know, like my grandmother, I wrote her a letter.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Yeah, and so it even on Substack, yeah, I think it was July, late July, they installed an AI detector. So you literally can now look at someone's piece and hit the AI detection. And what it will come up with is it will say, if they've allowed AI detection, and I do because I don't care, um, it will say this is uh AI written, AI assisted, or human. And then it will say it'd give if if I've wrote one, what I use AI for. Excuse me. So I would say something like um, I use AI for checking my grammar and spelling, and I say it used for checking and spelling, and that my writing style is uniquely flawed and mine, which it is, right? And so you look at my work, and if you get anything less than pretty much 195, you know, it's me. And the point is that it's uniquely flawed. Sometimes AI will pick up patterns in my writing that are repetitive that will show up as AI slop. And that's like 1% or 2%. And you know, you remember this is a four or five thousand-word post. So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff in there for it to pick on, and it still basically comes back. But I'll hit other people's stuff and they'll turned off the AI detector because they are using it to be able to get through. A lot of people use it for second language, right? When English is not their first language, English is hard. And so they're trying to figure all this out, and it's really, really complicated. But as far as plagiarism is concerned in academia, if the idea is yours, if the original idea is yours, which is what you're trying to do at the master's and PhD level, the idea is yours, the idea's fine. You're supporting documents, your literature review, and all that kind of stuff. Just give them credit. Who cares? If the original idea is yours, you should just be you should have piles and piles of citation to be happier now. Because again, that's what you do. You're just you're not trying to accidentally take credit for somebody else's stuff, but you want full credit for what you do that's unique.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

Yeah, it's it's crazy to me because if you think about it, because I've always thought this way too. Like everyone always thinks that everything that they have is an original idea, but it was it was it was spurned from something, right? Like music, for instance. You think about like Vanilla Ice in the 90s, where they were saying that he copied a queen styling, a queen song with his beat for Ice Ice Baby. Um, so he copied under pressure is what they're saying. But you know, he may have or he may not have, but people get inspired by certain things. And when they hear something or see something or read something and are inspired by that, they're gonna start talking about that. They may not have plagiarized on purpose, it may be something that inadvertently they heard, you know. And I think the hardest thing for most people to understand is that nothing is an original idea, and I don't think that's the argument here, but the fact of the matter is, is that I feel like almost every single idea that you have has to be cited, you know, because that's really where at the end of the, at the end of the world, you know, at the end of the day, we are, we've been here for so long. There have been so many ideas that have come through. How do you start to differentiate from that being an original idea or something that you have just gleaned from someone else's information? Because I take every single process that I do, even my sales process, and I'm like, I'm talking to a customer and I walk into their house and I tell them this, this, this, and this. And then I get a phone call. Hey, this happened with this one. And I turn around, I'm like, okay, well, this happened. Now I need to make sure that I tell the next customer that this happened so that they understand that, you know, like it just completely adding on to everything that you do every single day. So you take this original idea that may have been someone's original idea at some point and turn it into your own thing. And I think that that's going to be really hard to start to differentiate, even with AI, because it could be at some point you heard had some conversation with someone in your life that turned into your own idea, you know. Um I don't know. It's just a difficult thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Right. So the academic process is about peer review. And one of the things that happens in peer review is so I'm supposed to be a master's degree, is a master's of that, whatever it might be. Like I have two masters, a master's in communication and a master's international policy. That means I am supposed to be literate in that section of learning. Now, when I submit a thesis in that section of learning, I submit it to three other PhDs who PhD just means you've done something original in the field. I decided to do something in original in the field at the master's level. And so I presented something to three people who at least have a master's, in this case they were all PhDs, who peer-reviewed my work and said it is an original idea. It's a little sliver of an idea because, as you said, a lot of space. So what I did was I had built off of other people's stuff exactly what you were talking about.

SPEAKER_02 17:25

Right.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

I cited the people that I built it off of. I cited the research that I extended that was current, two pieces of research that were current. And so my work went to the right of one and to the left of other and extended some other people's stuff back from the 1950s. So it yes, it was an original idea, but I did it on the shoulders and the backs of other scholars, exactly as you put it. You know, it's not a completely original, it is an original conception, but I'm building off other people's work. And of course, I gave them credit for it. I didn't say, wow, we found something absolutely brand new. That's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_02 18:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

You're not going to find anything brand new after, you know, a couple hundred years of learning in certain fields. You're just not going to find it.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

Yeah. It's crazy. I mean, and that's the thing. I think that the majority of what you find that is an original idea or original thing is going to be something where someone did an like I think of science, right? I think of you doing a science experiment. All right, so we did this, this, this, and this, and this happened, you know. And we've no one has ever done this before. That's one, that's a completely different thing that you you will find that in. But other than that, like with music or art or whatever, you draw your inspiration from something. My daughter is, she loves drawing anime, and you can tell that she's drawn her in for inspiration from what other people have done. And nothing is really original other than the piece itself. That, you know, the face has this different specific line than what it had on this other face or the color of the hair or whatever. There's it's just crazy because our whole life is that way. My my beard is inspired by someone's beard, right? My haircut is inspired by someone's haircut. It's like I wasn't the original person to get a flat top. You know, there's millions of other people who get a flat top, but maybe I got it with this little circle in the back or a line, you know, whatever. It's life is just that way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

So I'll I'll PR promote my piece that I'm releasing because it is considered original research. So I basically look at the concept that Steve Bannon said for Trump, where he said, what we're going to do is we're going to flood the zone with shit, meaning a lot of stuff, so the media can't keep up, and that way they can't do a counter-narrative because we're just going to pound it with a whole lot of media. So what I did was myself and two other researchers had basically looked at 30 days before the last election cycle, 30 days before November, 30 days after, 30 days before the inauguration, 30 days after the inauguration, and asked the question: was there more media? Did it continue to build? Could you find that? Yes, we did. We found that. We looked at the well, again, small pieces. We looked at the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the uh New York Times. Okay. Just three papers, two left-leaning, one right-leaning. Again, not my way of looking at the world. We have outside sources that verify that they're biased right and left. That's that's part of doing research. So you look at the three sources and you say, Did the research build? Yes, it did. But what we also found was editors still showed up. Because the New York Times, if you aggregate the three papers together, yes, it built. But the Wall Street Journal did not cover at the same rate the New York Times did. New York Times covered at a much higher rate. So here's the thing the papers that actually hated Trump gave Trump more front page coverage. And all we were looking at, believe it or not, was the front page only of the newspaper, not the back pages, just the front page. And so you you look at that and you say, What did you find out from that? What you found out was Trump is either A, really good at poking the people that don't like him to cover him, which is considered unearned media, or it's just good business for the New York Times to cover him because their readers love it. Okay? So the point is that, and then you complain about him doing it, but the reality is you're raking in the money when he's doing it. So the causal part of this, trying to figure out what caused it, we don't know. We're just telling you that the phenomenon exists. Exists, and we're also telling you that the editors still have a voice because they don't all cover at the same rate.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Right.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

So now you now that's original research. And all it was designed to do was hey, is there really something called flooding the zone? Yes, there was. There's a liter hundred articles by journalists saying he's flooding the zone, and not one person had done research, original research to figure out if it even happened.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

All you got to do to really know that is to look at the the past, you know, uh when he was president before, because people are like, he didn't do anything. Well, he did a lot of things, but what he did was he ran interference in the media while he was doing his things behind the scenes. I mean, you look at like his first day in office, what did he do? He went in and he wrote hundreds of executive orders, okay? And we all know that they didn't all work, but what it did was it started to get the Supreme Court to look at these things to make sure that they were constitutional and that and changed it changed the way that things were done. So he's doing things, and I think it's funny because everyone's like, oh, he's doing that's illegal. Well, what he's doing is he's challenging the narrative. He's trying to challenge people to understand that we need to figure out whether this is constitutional or not, because it doesn't seem like it is, or it does seem like it is, and then what happens? These executive orders, some of them get through, some of them don't. I mean, it's but he's he's in the beginning, he just did the same thing. Like he would say whatever he wanted, and then he would go do what he needed to do in the background, I feel like.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Right, and very true. And so we all thought we saw it, we all perceived that we saw it. The only difference is we actually counted it. Yeah, we actually went and literally counted to see if what we thought we saw existed. And then we asked the question is, and that was the real finding in this was is that the New York Times covered him more for whatever reason, because we're not the editor, and we can't tell you what the editor did, but we can tell you that it went inverted to political leaning. And so who should have covered him more theoretically was the right leaning. But they were actually the one that didn't cover him the most. So it it's interesting because that's when you do, and that's back to the research thing. So, what are you trying to do? You're trying to basically say, hey, this is just original, it's not an original idea. Steve Bannon came up with the idea, and as you said, you could see it, but nobody had researched it. So it is considered original research.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Yeah, no, and that's you know, it's funny. This kind of brings some other thoughts in my mind too, because you think about like what they're trying to do with that, right? The reality with all of this scenario is that it's probably made a lot of these news outlets rich, right? Because they start uh it's not probably, it has, because they talk about what I find very funny about the media, about life, about all these things, and we're even having this conversation in my my daily job. Um, and sometimes you have to look at things from the other side and put it into perspective, right? And so, you know, we seem to have a lot of issues at my current place of employment with people talking about all the negative things that are happening. And I was talking to my employer the other day, and this is like, okay, so customer relations, right? Like we bank on the fact that there are a bunch of negative reviews or negative things that customers say, this and that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Well, we only hear about the negative things. So something was misordered, something wasn't the right color, something was whatever. We hear about the complaints, but we don't hear about the job that was flawless, right? And I, for one, know that I quote four jobs a day, and out of those four jobs a day, if you multiply that times five, because there's five days, we got 20 jobs, right? And I heard about one that went bad that week. And I will sit there and be pissed off about the fact that that one thing was bad, right? In reality, when the percentage of the good things that happen is much higher than the bad things. And so my boss was looking at it and he goes, you know, I don't understand why we're complaining about everything when we're lower than 0.1% in customer satisfaction. And then when you think about it that way, you're like, wow. Like, are we are we really big perfectionists, or do we just bitch and complain about all the bad things that happen? And then the people who are around there glom on that, and that's all you hear. Like you hear 10 people complaining about all the shit that went wrong, but you never hear them say anything about what went right. And so it's a struggle.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

So well, we're we're social creatures. And so to get along and to be part of the group, it's develops what we call a culture. And so if your culture is a culture that's slapping people on the back and saying, Man, great job, excellent, and and it looks at the negative, and that culture says, you know what, we're gonna do this, this, and this better next time. Okay, but you get into that culture of because we we've been examining this, um, my better half and I, as we go in to get customer service from places, right? We examine how the culture of the place, in other words, are you greeted with a smile? Are are problems, you know, like how can I make this better? Is the first word out of somebody's mouth when you you have a problem, is it I'm sorry? Is the first thing that they do when you ask for help, is it sure, what can I do to help? You know, what culture does that organization bring? And we were talking about being in Kroger the other day, and it was the weirdest Kroger adventure where I actually engaged the staff three times. And every time the staff showed up in an amazing way, like one of them, I was getting chicken tenders, and it just they were just coming out of the fryer, and he says to me, Listen, they're not quite right. I'm gonna put them back in for a few minutes. You okay with that? I know you've waited. And I said, No, no problem. He said, I'll throw an extra one in and for you. Three minutes later, they were out, threw in an extra one for me. The point was they were can do, they were smile, they were how can we fix it? Here's what's going on, sure I can help. And then I went to another organization and I w put in um a to-go order on their website, which sent me to an app. The app blew up, it charged me but didn't place the order. Says talk to the restaurant. I got there and I said, Here's what's going on. And the first thing the manager said, not I'm sorry, not there's a problem. It said, We have nothing to do with the app. Right. And I went, hold on a second. You have everything to do with that app. It was on your website. Number one, number two, this charge is to you. This charge says your company gets, well, we're not gonna get it. I said, here's the thing number one, stop talking over me. I said, and let me tell you what the situation is. Explained it, then he went back to the same thing, talked over me again. I said, Can I talk to a manager? I am the manager. Yeah, oh geez, we've really got problems. And I said, So what do you expect me to do? He says, Well, what you need to do is go stand in line to for your to-go order. What? I the whole point of this whole process was I said, you know what? It's super cool. I'm out of here. I left. I you know, sent a note to his management team and to the central office explaining what had happened. Because it's just bad customer service. Right. And that's and that's the whole point. It's back to the culture. Right. Is your culture smiling? Is it can do? Is it and and you know, you know everybody has a sucky day.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Right.

SPEAKER_01 30:11

But you know, if you're in a culture that says put a smile on it, you know, make it work, think about sports. Teams have a culture of winning, they have a culture of losing too.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

Right? They just get used to winning and they get used to losing. And it it's it's shocking how it kind of continues like a trend when all it is is somebody deciding to put a smile on their face.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

Yep. You're not going to win every battle. And I think that's the biggest thing is that people have to understand it's not what happens when you don't win that battle, it's what happens after when you don't win. What do you do to change that? And I don't know, it's crazy. But I think that over the last five years, I've tried to put in perspective myself more that you know, there are so many more positive things happening than the negative things that are happening. If we can just figure that out, then we're not going to be complaining all the time. So it is, it's a culture.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

And yeah, again, back to the culture of what are you trying to create is listen, I want to be around people who are smiling.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

I also want to be around people that find a problem and they go, Oh, listen, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you experienced that. I'm sorry that happened. Okay, let me see how I can fix that.

SPEAKER_02 31:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

I have no idea at this moment, but I'm going to find a way to fix it for you.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Yep. Come to come to the argument with a solution, not just a problem.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

Robert, another great conversation as usual. What do you got going on this week?

SPEAKER_01 31:45

As I said, I'm releasing that piece, which is actually called Trump's Flooding the Zone Media Strategy or Spectacle at Global Strategy Institute.substack.com.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

And you can check out Shaping Success Treasure Valley episode currently out with Andy Koenig, my friend from Koenig Distillery. Uh go check that out. The Caldwell Night Rodeo is out. I have the bottle right here. This is his Caldwell Night Rodeo bourbon. So very good episode with him. He's a friend of mine. Not only does he make bourbon, but we uh have we are friends and uh very exciting to see them sponsor the Caldwell Night Rodeo. So go check out that episode. It's live on YouTube. And uh we will see you next week on Two Nobodies Who Know Nothing.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

Have a wonderful week, everyone.