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 b******t.

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