A writer's dilemma
"Is it plagiarism?" and other complicated questions stemming from the emergence of competent AI
Dear Writer,
So the other day, I received this text from a good friend of mine:
The first thing I noticed was the preponderance of ALL CAPS. When I tell you that this person is not an ALL CAPS person, I mean it. This friend is always calm, even when her life is falling apart. She could be in the emergency room in dire circumstances, texting me that a shark bit off her left leg, and she would not resort to ALL CAPS. So I knew this was serious. I got back to her at the first possible minute, and she told me what had happened.
Turns out, she had been working on her non-fiction book, which is now in revisions, and someone had suggested she go into Chat GPT and let it help her revise. So she did. She put a couple of her paragraphs in and received the response and immediately panicked.
“It’s a better writer than me!” she said. “It gave me back something that was cogent and well-phrased. It gave me bullet points!”
Now, I wasn’t surprised by any of this. I’ve played around a bit with Chat GPT and it’s pretty damn good. I’m not threatened by it; Chat GPT just can’t do what a human can do when it comes to meaning, but it can write capably.
What I was surprised by was the next question, “If I use this, am I plagiarizing?”
“Of course not!” I said, and I was pretty sure I was right, but honestly, it was just a knee-jerk response. In every single instance where a writer has come to me and has said, “Am I plagiarizing?” the answer has been a firm and decisive, “Fuck no.”
Plagiarism is like narcissistic personality disorder in that way; if you’re wondering if you’re doing it, you’re probably not, because the people who plagiarize don't ask that question, the same way that people with NPD don’t ask that question.
But still, since the words, “Lani Diane Rich loves plagiarism!” have appeared on this, the internet of our Lord Beyoncé, let me say, for the record, that I am not pro-plagiarism.
What had happened is this…
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Some years ago, there was a romance writer who had plagiarized whole passages from scientific studies on…. and you’re not gonna believe this… ferrets. To this day, I do not know why in the world there was a need for ferret research in her work but that was the case. This was early in the era of internet sleuthing, and it was fascinating to see unfold. Someone had read the passages and noticed a distinct shift in tone, so they put some of the text into a search engine and BOOM. There it all was, word for word, in a biologist’s article on the black-footed ferret. The biologist, as it turned out, wasn’t that upset about it; it was a fun story, and it got his research in front of a lot of people who would never have seen it otherwise.
Anyway, this was the first violent online cancellation that I watched happen up close, because it was happening in the romance community, and I did not enjoy the experience. I foolishly made a comment on a blog at the time that the people who were tearing the romance writer apart seemed to be enjoying the outrage a bit much. The writer had been reported and held accountable, and while it is of absolutely no import that the victim didn’t seem to mind because plagiarism is very bad no matter how the victim feels about it, maybe we could stop ripping the flesh off her bones since the accountability achievement seemed to be unlocked?
Yeah. I know. As Mike Birbiglia likes to say, “I’m in the future also.”
Here’s the thing I have since learned; once the mob has their torches and pitchforks out, you can safely step aside or join in, but if you ask anyone to reflect on whether their outrage is overkill, you’ll be lucky to get out alive. I didn’t know that then, and this corner of Ferretgate discourse eventually devolved into, “Lani Diane Rich loves plagiarism!” until someone else made the same point and they pivoted and went after them.
For the record: I don't love plagiarism, but I also think that the people who engage in plagiarism a) know damn well what they’re doing and b) don’t give a shit, while the rest of us freak out at every corner thinking we’re committing plagiarism when we are demonstrably not. The people who plagiarize don’t worry about it, and the rest of us worry about it way too much.
I once got an email from a writer who was freaking out because her heroine hit an intruder in the head with a frying pan in the opening scene and Jenny Crusie did that in Agnes and the Hitman and for some reason this writer wanted absolution from me. Now, y’all know how much I love Jenny Crusie, but she was not the first to have a heroine hit an intruder in the head with a frying pan, and I doubt she’ll be the last. If this writer had gone into Agnes and lifted the very passage, changing only a few words here and there, we’d have something to discuss. But in this case, I ruled: Not Plagiarism. (I also checked with Jen about it, and she agreed with me; not plagiarism.)
The reality is, if you are genuinely writing from your own sacred inner creative space, you can’t plagiarize. There is the argument that those with eidetic or photographic memories might “accidentally” plagiarize because they are remembering a passage word for word, but if you have that kind of brain that can remember the exact phrasing of something but not that someone else wrote it, well… I deliver some severe side-eye.
So I maintain: You cannot accidentally plagiarize. It takes time and effort and deliberate action to copy what someone else wrote. The closest you can come without knowing goddamn well what you’re doing is the kind of thing that I realized I’ve done in the past; folding in a phrase that you heard somewhere and forgot where you heard it.
For instance, at one point, I had a character say, “I hate to be the sugar in your gas tank,” and then some years later, when I was watching an old episode of Moonlighting, I realized that David Addison said that exact thing. I heard it when I was 15 or so, it sat in the corner of my brain for a long time, and then I put it in a book without realizing it. That kind of thing is definitely possible, and as close to plagiarism as you can get accidentally, but I still don’t think it’s plagiarism.
But back to the point; my friend was in an ALL CAPS panic that by putting her work into an AI engine and getting it back rephrased, she would be committing plagiarism if she used the rephrasing.
Here’s why it’s a hard no:
The AI just took her thoughts and her writing and rephrased it. If anything, the AI is plagiarizing her.
When I typed the topic of her query into the AI, without providing her own work first, the result was nothing like her specific work that had her specific knowledge and expertise in it.
Having an AI rephrase your stuff is okay; you’re still going to have to review it and fix anything the AI got wrong, and that work is still yours, the same way that if I edited her work and gave it back to her, it would still be hers.
To calm her down, I put some chunks from How Story Works into the AI and it spat back some stuff that was, in my opinion, a little flatter than my original material, but it was pretty accurate. But still; that work was based on my work, and if I wanted to use it, it would not be plagiarism.
But that’s non-fiction; what about fiction? Interesting. We went into the AI and said, “Give me an idea for a novel,” and it gave us ideas, some of them intriguing, but how could we possibly know that these ideas hadn’t been done before? That the AI wasn’t stealing someone else’s work and handing it off to us?
We did a search of the basic story points the AI gave us and couldn’t find anything that matched, so that was comforting. But also… ideas are not a big deal; fiction is all about the execution of the idea, and that work would have to be yours if you went at it honestly and—again—weren’t copying and pasting someone else’s work.
It was fun to ask the questions, to philosophize and dig into this new terrain of morality and creativity. This is where I come down on it, and I might be wrong, but it’s where I stand at the moment: Not Plagiarism.
But then again, as everyone knows, Lani Diane Rich loves plagiarism so… you really can’t trust her.
What do you think?
Everything,
L
This fascinated me. All my life I've read: mythology, fairy tales, old story poems, fantasy, classics. I'm a librarian. My writing is informed by every word I've ever read or spoken as an oral storyteller. There's so much material woven into my books even I am unable to disentangle what I heard, read, or spoke at some moment in time from what my imagination has done with it! I used to worry about this all the time, to the point where it shut down my creativity. I was so terrified of accidentally stealing someone else's idea, name, phrase, or character, a thing I would never knowingly do. Then the wave of cultural appropriation washed over us and I was newly terrified that people would say I couldn't use a character from Greek mythology because I'm not Greek. I couldn't use Snow White because Disney did. I couldn't use a character from a fragment of an old tale because the anonymous story teller in the tenth century did!
I wrote anyway, but it was my deepest, darkest secret. Until I slowly started coming out of the closet with books "everyone" said were unsellable, too long, too complicated, and too weird! I can come up with a thousand reasons why I can never make it as a writer and a thousand reasons why I'm not a real writer but a parasite.
In the meantime I've written two books of 150,000 words each and am working on the third to complete the trilogy. And I've stopped worrying so much. I refuse to be politically correct, whatever that means. Political correctness is like trying to pin jello to the wall. The need and joy in writing overcomes all these fears and ideologic posturing. Adding AI concerns to the mix is not useful for me and it wouldn't stop me from doing what I do in any case, so I'm bypassing it at this point!
The writer in me says "Yeah, yeah, I know ... they'll arrest me. They'll sue me. They'll find me and come for me and burn the house down with my book collection (which by itself would condemn me, as it's filled with books many would like to ban) in it. They'll threaten me, hate me, send awful emails, try to deplatform and silence me. What shall we write today?"