From plagiarism to AI: Protecting creativity in a digital world

As a journalist, I’ve had plenty of downs to go along with my ups – I’ve been sworn at, spat on, beaten up, shot at, arrested and sued. But what has hurt as much, or more, than all of those, has been becoming a victim of plagiarism.

The worst examples happened when I was working as a reporter in Namibia for a South African newspaper group. Because so many foreign news agencies and papers didn’t have anyone on the ground permanently in Namibia, a lot of the facts in my stories – and even direct quotes – were often used by hacks in Joburg filing for their foreign editors.

That sort of behaviour would go by the definition of “fair usage”, by which copyright law functions.

But, it was the wholesale ripping-off of unique ideas – and in one case, an entire feature, including the punctuation – which was really offensive.

One incident, where the Washington Times correspondent in South Africa lifted, lock, stock and barrel, my image of future inhabitants of the Windhoek government buildings, post-independence, wearing Mao suits and calling each other “comrade” was especially galling.

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Even worse, though, was when the Joburg stringer for London’s Gemini News Agency stole an entire feature piece of mine from The Star in Joburg… right down to the commas. Unfortunately for him, a newspaper in Windhoek was a Gemini customer and ran the piece on their pages – where I saw it and almost choked on my morning coffee and cheese “brötchen” (roll) in a restaurant off Kaiserstrasse.

If theft of intellectual property was bad more than 30 years ago, it is going to get exponentially worse with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). Programmes like ChatGPT are being used by everyone – from lawyers to journos.

Elon Musk has just made his AI system, Grok, free to users of X, so the theft of other people’s creativity – which is essentially what AI is – is going to explode.

I read a disturbing social media post the other day where someone recounted a conversation with a university masters student, who seemed to be unable to use the correct words or used simple phrases out of keeping with his intelligence level. The student admitted he uses ChatGPT for almost everything he does and that he seems to find difficulty holding on to words and their meanings.

Use it or lose it. That’s the danger of dumbing down the human brain and outsourcing thinking to machines. I hate to contemplate humanity in 20 years …

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