The past few years have seen the rise of generative AI. Even ChatGPT can create really good images now, several a day for free, of whatever you ask for. I have written a few articles before (some when this website was still Dutch) about my experiments with it and how it actually works. I explained how current copryight laws just can’t be easily adapted to fit this new technology, which most people still don’t understand at all (including those who make it!)
But I never really used AI extensively or talked about my views on copyright (issues). From time to time, I have used some random free AI image generator or asked ChatGPT a single very specific question. Everything I made with it were free hobby projects, mostly board games, where I transparently disclosed some parts were AI if needed. I didn’t think much more of it and just saw it as a nice little extra to my productivity.
Well … this article will talk about copyright, plagiarism, and what has changed to lead to my current conundrum(s).
Now, this fact—barely using AI at all—might surprise you. I’m a developer, for example, and a large chunk of developers claim they’re using AI all the time now. For them, ChatGPT basically replaced Googling something. Generative AI is a massive gamechanger in basically all my fields of work: I’m a writer (AI can generate stories/text), I’m an illustrator (AI can generate images), I’m a musician (AI can generate songs on demand), and so forth.
My AI Usage
So why did I only use it very infrequently, for something very specific?
Partially because AI just wasn’t that good yet. I’m afraid to say that it’s good enough now—but if I asked for the same hyperspecific illustration two years ago as the one I asked of ChatGPT this morning, the result would have been garbage.
Partially because the entire idea of being creative is the process. That’s the issue most creative people are having: they care about making stuff, not the end product. Which is why they struggle to finish things, to make them “commercially viable”, to earn enough income from their work. Creativity is a process, not the final book/painting/game/whatever you happen to hold in your hands. So, why let AI take that away? If at all possible, I want to do everything myself.
But you’ll notice I’m talking in past tense. AI is slowly creeping into my life too, and that of everyone around me, even those who barely knew it existed 6 months ago. Why draw a tree yourself if you can get a really pretty one in the exact style you need in 5 seconds? Why write your own marketing blurb for your book, if you can also just feed AI the outline and ask it for some exciting summaries?
As stated, this usage has never really bothered me (or anyone else). Of all the board games on Pandaqi, I guess about half used AI for something (however small or invisible). It says so on the page, 99% of the work is still my own, and even then, all those games are free. And they will always be, if I can help it. Creating illustrations to make another board game idea a reality would have taken at least a week before. Now I can get something even better (usually) in 30 minutes of clever prompting, selection and editing. So I can create more games! Finish more projects from my list of a thousand game ideas!
This is not an exaggeration. I’m drowning in ideas and no time to make them. I state this clearly because it’s perhaps the most pressing issue that I and many other creatives face. We have so many ideas that we truly believe would be really cool, and fun, and even improve the lives others. But by the time we complete one such project, ten more ideas have popped up, and the list never shrinks. AI has been a life-saver in allowing me to actually create more cool projects and get them out into the world faster. Not because I am greedy or don’t care about quality—as stated, 99% of my work is completely free—but because I want those ideas to exist!
I have never cared about money, or fame, or “credits”. I have only cared about creating cool stuff, and then sharing the cool stuff (and ideas) so others can make even cooler stuff even faster. I will never mind if you take my code or designs and use them as a springboard for your own projects. Be my guest! Why should you have to waste a week relearning something (drawing another darn tree) when others have already learned it before you?
Money, Money, Money
We live, however, in a society in which you need money to survive. I’ve been working hard, growing my skill, trying different things for many years now … but I’ve barely earned an income from any of it. My Pandaqi website has loads of visitors, but the games (and even their underlying code/sketches/designs) are free and publicly accessible, and the number of people who donate is … practically zero.
And thus, for the past year or so, I’ve been working on an online store. A web shop. A place where I will sell things for money—what an invention! The plan is sound, the work I’ve done has value, and I wouldn’t need a ridiculous amount of visitors to earn a liveable wage and stay afloat. But I still need to ask money for my creative projects.
Which made me stop dead in my tracks and ask myself: “Am I going to use AI for any of the webshop’s products?”
These are not free hobby games anymore. They’re a wide variety of creative works and experiences. They are intended for commercial use. Me being me, my first principle for this store was that everything I sell should be usable and reusable however the customer wants. There are no extra licenses, no restrictions, no shady schemes to extract more money. You pay for a product, you get it immediately and forever, and now can do whatever you please. Including, as I mentioned, use it as a springboard for your own projects to sell elsewhere.
Can I do that if I use AI? The world still isn’t sure if anything made with AI is actually your own. As such, selling those products might create issues where the one who bought it actually isn’t allowed to do whatever they want with it.
Will it turn people away? Cast my store in a bad light from which it will never recover? Should I make a statement about it on the website, or will that only make people more suspicious?
As I write this, I’ve made a large pile of products already. As before, 99% is my own work, 1% has AI involved in some way. It was simply the balance I’d found that lead to the most productivity and creativity, and trying to change it ruined my productivity and made me freeze in doubt. Looking back on that work, I decided that this was my answer.
I can’t say that no AI will ever ever be used for anything on the webstore. That’s too strong a statement to ever be true, even if I could predict the future. It’s so big now that people are using AI without knowing it sometimes. But I also don’t want to say that. In many cases, I use AI as a tool for inspiration, productivity, automating boring routine tasks, or getting over a bump/problem/impossible mountain of work in a project.
Why should I cast it aside completely?
People give the argument that AI was trained on other people’s data. Their works of art, their books, their social media posts, etcetera. This isn’t a very strong argument, as explained in an older Dutch article, because the actual “copying” of someone else’s work done by AI is so incredibly minor, vague and transformative that it very definitely falls under “fair use”. Simply looking at someone else’s drawing for half a second is, under current law and definitions, more “plagiarism” than that. But it is an argument and I can see why people say it’s a copyright nightmare and raise the alarm.
People give the argument that AI can only regurgitate what it has seen before. Using it will lack any creativity and everything made will be the same gray slop. The first part is true, yes, but the conclusions drawn from it are not. What is creativity? How do humans get new ideas? They see something, and then they see another thing, and their brain connects/associates the two into some mixture! Tada! New idea!
That is exactly what AI does, only they have much more knowledge, can more freely associate, are much faster, etcetera. Nearly 100% of my usage of ChatGPT is for inspiration—for getting the final bits of an idea specified so I can get started today—because AI is much better than humans at being actually creative on demand. The only “issue” here is that AI doesn’t disclose sources, while humans tend to know where they got an idea from/when they got it. That is an argument against its use … if only I cared.
Copyright Should Disappear
The issue here, and I’ve been struggling with this for 10+ years, is that I don’t believe in copyright, plagiarism, trademarks, patents, etcetera.
No, I don’t think the system has to change. Our current system is heavily flawed, abused by the powerful and suffered by the powerless, it creates massive amounts of injustice and waste, and is so incredibly complicated that nobody actually knows the rules. The emergence of AI has only underlined all these known issues. Surely it can be improved, but that’s not what I’m after.
I think it just should not be a thing at all.
Knowledge should not be gatekept. Inventions, discoveries, ideas, lessons learned, it should all be shared. It should belong to everyone who stumbles upon it.
Usage of (common) words and imagery should not be forbidden, just because some company somewhere bribed a clerk to give them a trademark on it. That’s just a direct attack against freedom of speech. And makes everyone’s lives needlessly difficult.
Imagine how much further society would be. If everything was shared, if inventions weren’t imprisoned by a sole company, if kids could freely use the universes of their favorite authors as an easy entrypoint to writing their own novels. But we all know the stories about innocent Disney-themed parties/projects being sued into oblivion. Writers being cancelled or unpublished because their story bears some resemblance to another popular one. Laughable lawsuits being filed daily by scammers claiming copyright on your game—and winning, because your game has already been removed, your reputation is damaged, and you might not have the funds to battle it.
I would be absolutely fine with people stealing my work. I would forego all copyright on all I’ve made if I could. I would help the people who see a game of mine and decide to improve it and sell it as their own.
The entire system of “owning” some piece of information, or idea, or even a fucking word or simple drawing should go. You can own physical objects, things you can literally hold in your hand, and nothing else. Because the concept of ownership of anything else is meaningless. It can’t be objectively proven, and that “ownership” can be transfered instantly and freely by simply … saying the idea or sharing the knowledge.
Think of the common example of two people inventing something at the same time. These two inventors have never met each other, they live in different parts of the world, they have in no way copied or plagiarized anything. They simply put in the work and arrived at the same conclusions around the same time. In our current system, one of them will happen to “claim” that invention first (in the eyes of the law) and get all credits and benefits, while the other person gets nothing. In fact, the other one isn’t even allowed to create, use or teach their own invention now! How idiotic is that?
Think of the common examples of life-saving medicine or massive technological jumps. If any medicine discovered was freely shared and could be made by anyone, it would literally save countless lives. If any major technological improvement was shared and built upon immediately, it would reduce waste (resources, time, money, manpower) and lead to even bigger inventions faster.
Think of the writer’s rooms in Hollywood (or similar places). We have plenty evidence that they are literally told “this other film was really successful last year, so make something like it!” This is the first move of all executives 99% of the time. Pick the popular thing and copy it, then hope to be equally popular. Yet nobody talks about copyright issues then, and they apply this tactic all the time because it works (often enough). It works when you have a template of something that worked and can expand and improve upon it. It saves you time and energy, and allows you to more quickly get to an even better product. If you don’t have to fool around and rediscover everything every time, but just copy what is known to work, you can get to even better creations faster.
And where is the line on copying? When is something inspiration or fair use, which everyone knows is a crucial element of creating anything and is even championed? And when does that suddenly flip into being plagiarism or copyright infringement and all hell breaks loose? Nobody knows!
I’ve been completely honest about my inspirations all the time. I mention it at the start of a devlog which specific (board/video) games gave me the idea and directly led to making this project. Despite having hundreds of ideas every day, and trying to be unique and creative, this showed me time and time again that everything you make can be traced back to some clear origins. And I basically copied the thing I liked from three other things, mashed them together, and made that.
When I mention it in the devlog, it’s clear as day. But if I had never mentioned it, nobody would be the wiser. Because the final product I made bears only a vague resemblance to its influences, because nobody can clearly see the individual parts I copied.
As such, the current systems just don’t work and will never work. Because the entire idea of “claiming” something intangible is at best a small boon to someone’s profit and in most cases actively harmful, blocking, and prone to the whims of however a judge reads the law this time.
So, in my view, it should all go away.
Right now, you’re probably thinking about all the consequences of this. Yes, I have already missed out on a ton of money because of these beliefs. Modern society makes it near impossible to earn a living wage in general, let alone if you don’t aggressively protect the things that make you money. But it’s what I’ve chosen long ago. And I am incapable of not standing for what I believe or doing what seems truthful and useful to me. It’s more an issue than an asset in the current climate, honestly.
How Would That Work?
What would be the consequences if copyright disappeared?
Well, rampant thievery, everyone will say. Whenever a popular author publishes a book, someone else can just download it and immediately sell it as if it were their own work. Whenever a game is released, the next day a thousand people have “released” the exact same game, hoping customers fall for it. Many missed sales, many people who wrongly credit someone else for the hard work you put in, and so forth.
Yes, this is obviously the largest threat.
Firstly, let me remind you that this is already happening today. Those who are not big or rich enough already get their work stolen every single day. My entire catalog of games on the Play Store (when I still had things on there) was removed once because of a “copyright claim”. Nonsense, of course. But now my games were gone for a while, creating dead links and missing sales, while I had to find the energy and time to prove to them that I made them. And I was a very very small developer!
Countless times I’ve encountered stories of other (bigger) developers who had work stolen, games reuploaded by scammers, acts from people who clearly didn’t believe in copyright too. And what did our “copyright system” do? It made it incredibly hard, if not impossible, for them to get the situation resolved. Because there are tons of confusing laws around this, and everyone has their own policies, and what constitutes as “proof” is sometimes too lenient (“the scammer provided proof too … by simply uploading a few edited screenshots”) and sometimes too strict (“sure you provided source files … but maybe you stole/fabricated those too!”).
Our current systems of copyright (and trademarks, patents, etcetera) are a bandaid that’s not even doing much. It makes any ideas or work a plaything for already powerful companies. That’s far more important than the fact it, sometimes, if they’re lucky, protects smaller creatives too.
Secondly, this threat can be (and IS usually) solved by working on the two things our society sorely misses: honesty and common sense.
- Most people know the company or person that should be behind a piece of work. And so, before you buy, just check if it’s from them. Or check for any clear signals that it was copied by someone else trying to make a quick buck. For example, Pandaqi is my developer name, Pandaqi.com is my website, there are tons of personal references and links to other things on there, its blog is regularly updated with behind the scenes and details in tandem with what I’m doing in real life, etcetera. You’d have to be insane to see a Pandaqi game without all that proof and just instantly believe the anonymous scammer behind that website is the one who made it.
- We should put a much higher value on honesty. People who consciously take actions that are untrue, such as claiming “I made this game” or “I wrote this book”, should be penalized for that. People should put in the effort to uncover truth, and anyone who has had a blatant disregard for it should not get off as lightly as they usually do. In the same way, it should be immediately suspicious if someone hides behind anonymity. If you can’t find any details about a company, if a person has no photo/details/history of work, if a person has been known to lie in the past—just assume they didn’t make a thing and don’t buy it from them.
As stated, this already happens. Stealing of entire or partial works happens a lot, but most people only hear about the big or exciting cases. Scams have existed since the dawn of humanity, both online and offline, and it is always good to use common sense and to be highly distrustful of someone who hasn’t been honest in the past.
Many consumers have already learned to double-check who is selling something on Amazon, because there’s usually the first party (the one who made the product) … and then a thousand third-party sellers trying to trick you into believing they’re the real deal. They’re lying, lying, lying. Picking names that are intentionally very similar to the official one. Adding random buzzwords and keywords to the title and description, and nobody is calling them out on it. Amazon isn’t doing anything about it, because they don’t care about truth, they care about profit.
Many people, including myself, will check if authors have a website/blog/social media account. I simply want a vague idea who is behind a work, what other things they made, bonus points if they have “writer’s diaries” giving a look into their thought process and problems solved during writing. Like most, we want a personal connection, a human behind the thing created. This doesn’t need to be grandiose: a simple picture, a history of work, a custom website design that fits their style, it’s already more effort/details than any thief would ever put in.
But Everyone Would Steal That Too!
Can’t the thief just steal that too? And then whatever more proof you provide that you made something, can’t the thief just steal THAT too?
Yes and (mostly) no.
No, because many things are single-user. The domain name owned by the author simply can’t be owned by the thief too. The publishing house (name/account), the details of the print, it can’t really be stolen.
No, because stealing stuff is way more effort and sometimes takes way more skill than people think.
For example, Amazon’s process for uploading a new book is a fricking nightmare. They purposely don’t have any batch uploading or automatic uploading. When AI became a thing, they limited uploads to three per day, and every person can only have one account. They’ll catch you if you try to circumvent it and ban you forever. It takes a while to upload a single book, you need to fill in stuff correctly, their algorithm performs some checks that take a while, etcetera. You’d have to really believe in this venture and have lots of time and patience to copy loads of other people’s books like this.
Or, take hosting a website. Especially a very specific website made by someone with tech know-how, like me. The front user can only see/access so much. Just downloading the entire website requires skill, hosting it yourself with a domain name that might fool someone requires skill + money, realizing how to fill in the missing gaps requires skill, and so forth. And by the time the copycat has spent days or weeks making a perfect convincing clone … it takes one press of a button on my end to completely change my entire website and put them back on square one.
But yes, say people don’t use their common sense and pay attention, and you have lots of skill and dogged determination, you can surely just download someone’s website or social media account or credentials and copy them flawlessly.
That’s why I mentioned the honesty part. Lying like this should be far more frowned upon. Creating an account that steals someone’s identity should have huge consequences. Claiming you are someone who you’re not should have huge consequences. Because it’s an active choice to mislead and attack others, and it should be a crime.
It honestly boggles my mind how we’ve let it come this far. You can be sued (and lose) for telling the truth if someone feels it was said in bad faith or to ruin their image (slander/libel). You can’t do shit when someone (say, a president of the United States …) lies and lies and consciously misleads. Everyone just shrugs and says “people lie, get used to it”.
No, I will not get used to it. Neither should anyone else.
As the TV show Andor (Season 2) said: “The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.”
It may sound dramatic, but I have basically lived these words since I was 10. I vowed to never lie again, no matter the personal cost. It’s actually been relatively easy, though I wish I could say that others have followed my lead when they saw the results …
We can’t progress as a society unless we tackle the mystifying acceptance (even encouragement) of lies and dishonesty all around the world. We need copyright (and other protections of final work) because our other systems are failing, not because it’s anything close to a good or useful idea on its own. We need a society that searches for truth and champions truth, and that mercilessly casts out those who consciously lie and mislead, to make actual progress.
Say, a company used an artist’s work, but when asked about it said it was their own? It happens, even with our current copyright system. Right now, however, you can’t do much else than make it public and hope enough people believe you, and then hope you have the money to pay for the court case or that the company somehow has a change of heart.
In a system where truth is championed, the moment it’s proven that this company indeed actively lied about who drew their illustrations, they are done for. Nobody trusts them ever again. And that simple fact should be enough to make almost anyone want to credit the right person or honestly admit it when they copied something.
Our copyright systems, like most of our flawed systems, are just bandaids we need because we somehow value the right to endlessly lie and turn off common sense even more.
I want to solve that underlying issue—not waste any time with questions of copyright and ownership. I want to make as much cool stuff as I can, and help others do the same, in my lifetime. Not waste any time in disputes over nothing or worrying if my AI generated image has secretly been inspired for 0,01% by some drawing someone made twenty years ago.
Conclusion
In modern society, yes, we need our flawed copyright system because of our very flawed laws and economic system.
These AIs are already putting people out of work (translators, artists, etcetera). And our current system requires you to have work, or you simply can’t live, and it never asks the question if this is actually a necessity or if there’s any reason to believe there should be exactly as many jobs as there are humans.
And so I understand those who fight it and call its usage theft. Its why I’ve been conservative with its usage myself. I don’t want to endanger others’ livelihood, just as I wouldn’t want others to do the same to me. I don’t want people to steal my webshop products (once it launches), or never buy anything and ruin my reputation because I used some AI here and there, because I need that money to live.
But I have a vision for a future where it’s incredibly rare for people to actively lie and claim they made/did something (which they didn’t). It’s absolutely possible. If you can invent a million laws to allow people to “own” words or specific executions of ideas, you can surely invent some laws that crack down on rampant lying and dishonesty. And if you do that, a small bit of common sense is enough for people to find the actual creators of some work and buy it from them, if they so desire.
In my view, that would be the ideal balance. No patents, no trademarks, none of that. Everything is free, open, shared. And I have seen enough of the world to know that people will support the original creators and make sure to credit them, not anyone who falsely claims to be them. That’s the entire idea of “brand loyalty” and “having fans”. I could release a game tomorrow, and someone might steal it and release an identical game as theirs on the same day, but people will still buy mine. Because they like my work, because they’re looking to play my next game.
I believe that creators will still be rewarded for putting in the work. Sure, some profit might go to people copying your stuff. But that’s fine. I just need enough money to survive. No true creative is in it for the money, as we’ve been told over and over and over since we were a child that artists don’t earn money.
Like most people, I want the things I consume or enjoy to be made by humans. Not robots or algorithms. Also not companies! I want to be able to sing the praises of those talented humans, credit them, support them, check out their other work. I don’t want some faceless corporation behind the thing that was made, because of how opaque and dishonest they usually are. With simple habits, I know there is a human doing human work behind the rare things I buy/enjoy/consume. If people use a bit of common sense and check the origins of work, and we value honesty above all, a world without copyright will be a massive improvement instead of ruining all creatives everywhere.
Every invention is to the benefit of all. Every bit of knowledge, inspiration, creativity can be freely used to create even more of that by whoever picks it up. Companies have no more “ownership” of anything than a single person who needs that thing.
The emergence of AI does threaten livelihoods and create copyright issues, although it’s not as bad as some make it out to be. It does reduce creativity and ownership, though it’s again not as bad as some say.
I will still use AI going into the future, probably in that 1%/99% split with manual work. I will use it for all the webshop products, wherever it’s simply the best tool for the job. To create the best possible thing in the least amount of time. So I can start creating the next cool thing even faster. Not because I don’t see its dangers or how many jobs are lost, but because I disagree with copyright in the first place and actively work towards a different future. The best thing you can do to fight a system or policies is to not actively participate in them and, hopefully, show the right way yourself.
I will not go after anyone who (almost) completely copies my work, or tries to pass it off as their own. You do you. Waste time on that if you want. I don’t agree with copyright, I don’t intrinsically want its protection, and I just want to share everything and be completely transparent. And so I will not chase you down … unless it means I don’t earn enough money to literally survive.
Hopefully, some day soon, that final sentence isn’t necessary anymore. Maybe universal basic income. Maybe simply a more reasonable and fair distribution of wealth and income, because I am earning money from other jobs, but it’s taxed to hell and simply not enough to survive. But if I ever gain full financial freedom? All my work becomes free, copy it however often you like, go nuts!
This article became way too long. Maybe it’s a bit rambly, as I struggled to keep topics together and sort the flow of thoughts. I hope the message is still clear, and that it maybe gave you some food for thought. My wish to completely abolish all copyright/patents/trademarks/etcetera has existed since I was very young. And it has surprised many, especially because I am a hypercreative person and my entire livelihood will probably always live or die by these laws. It explains why I both understand AI’s dangers and counter arguments, but still continue to use it and don’t see copyright issues as valid arguments.
I just want an honest society based on sharing, you know? If I aggressively protect my own ideas and inventions, pretend to be against AI because of copyright, I’m literally doing the opposite of that. It would be the biggest lie I tell myself.
Until next time,
Tiamo