The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

A similar thing is happening to me. I worked on something for 3 years which I give away for free to help people and a thief took my software, ran it through ai to rebrand everything and relaunched as their own app. Unfortunately the ai missed a few Easter eggs I had hidden so the theft is undeniable. Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order. They refuse to look at or arbitrate. So now I'm on to fighting this in court on principal which is going to be expensive.

Theft is only going to become worse. It's already so easy and it's going to become even easier. We aren't prepared for what's ahead.

From the article I guess Qontour reproduced the entire text verbatim.

> it also includes the entire text of the book, from its opening 800-word foreword to a complete archive of all 311 neologisms... all penned by Koenig.

So it doesn't seem likely to me that they asked AI to make a fan site and it spat out the book; instead they asked AI to make a fan site and then copy-pasted the text of the book into it.

Perhaps a just outcome would be for Koenig to gain the rights to the page. However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way.

On the list of things that make this possible, AI comes after the anonymity of web sites and of companies (per another comment, Prompt Digital Inc (DBA Qontour) - which is who exactly?), and the fact that the infringer has complete control over their reach.

The asymmetry between stealing and getting caught or stopped was baked in long before AI, but this will become much more prevalent because the cost of infringing has been reduced by orders of magnitude.

Relatedly, legal copying seems just as problematic: I see both software and media being munged and parroted as soon as it appears, which means innovators do not get the benefit of their innovation. I personally have halted any projects where I can't completely control access to the product, which is a huge damper on innovation.

This is exactly what DMCA takedowns are actually for.

I ran into something like this a few months ago. There was this new indie game, Idols of Ash, that had just released and was blowing up on streaming. I googled it and found what looked like a legit site, idolsofash.fun. It had detailed strategy guides, screenshots, and even an embedded copy of the game. But the embed was buggy, so I searched for the game's itch.io page and left a comment.

Turns out the "fansite" was unaffiliated, and after playing the real game, it became clear the whole site was AI slop. It got gameplay mechanics subtly wrong, the screenshots didn't always relate to the captions, and the embed was a shoddy decompilation pulled from the game's files (easy since it was built with the Godot engine, and presumably where the site's knowledge of the game came from). It's apparently something afflicting a lot of indie devs -- somebody uses Claude or similar to rip your game and spin up a detailed site where you can play it for free. Not sure what the angle is, though, since the site says it's unofficial in the footer, links to the official Itch storefront, and doesn't insert ads or malware. Could just be an overzealous fan, but the whole thing struck me as very strange.

I think the affiliate links are fine and the wholesale plagiarism is unlawful at best and likely criminal.

Just to be clear: The bootleg site is pointing to the Amazon listing of the actual book (ISBN 9781501153648, Simon & Schuster, published 2021). The Amazon link is not pointing to an AI slop version of the book.

So how is the bootleg site making money? The Amazon link was created with Amazon Associates, the Amazon affiliate program (you can see the affiliate link code, tag=promptdigital-20, in the Amazon URI).

This is how AI slop can be monetized: poorly gated Amazon programs like Amazon KDP, Amazon Associates, and that Meta monetization program. Anything goes, from crafty scams like this to over-the-top social media slop like shrimp Jesus.

I made up a few words like this myself, all of which rhyme with either orange, purple, or silver.

https://rhymes.pressbin.com

But John Koenig's work is really well done and packaged in such a consumable way. I'm sorry to hear he's the victim of copyright infringement.

I'm playing through the couch co-op game Split Fiction, and this is basically the premise (with more fun gameplay).

AI laundering is going to become a major tactic in all domains. Fiction and nonfiction writing, software, video, music, you name it.

It's easy to take GPL software and rewrite it in another language without the license. Trivially easy. It's possible you'll even be able to do the same with just compiled bytecode soon.

Just recently there was an instance where Nous Research Hermes agent cloned some Chinese OSS. It's happening much more broadly than this, though.

This might warrant special attention unless we want to live in a world without copyright. Though that's also one additional possible outcome.

Prompt Digital Inc (DBA Qontour) is a Webflow premium partner.

So let’s ask Webflow’s public relations dept. how cool are they with the fact their partner is a lier and plagiarist.

What's funny is that if you go to the linked site that's meant to be a showcase of the design agency's design skills, you'll see that it's ... pretty shit.

Ugly. Random. Thoughtless.

This reminds me of when a bunch of cryptobros paid a ludicrous sum for one of the pitch bibles for Jodorowsky's unmade film adaptation of Dune and assumed that owning this rare object gave them license to pitch movie adaptations of it. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a38815538/dune-c...

Thanks to free speech, telling people to go fuck themselves is protected expression in the US. I took the liberty.

I'm interested to see if this is the whole story[0], but on the surface it sure is infuriating.

[0] this article and a bsky post by the author of the article are the only sources I can find other than the website itself - which is definitely as chock full of AI as indicated

AI slop is a thief. But we knew this already.

Correction: some random tiny scam company copied a book without permission in blatant violation of copyright law, and AI was briefly and tangentially involved with the final product.

In other words: AI stole someone’s soul with its own metallic claws! Out with the devil machines.

I'm going to die of old age in this world where no-one can feel safe to make any small, unrelated, irrelevant, unpopular, ugly, worthless thing without the threat of being fed to the lawyers.

No-one is seriously fighting the tyranny of copyright that covers basically the whole world. Even AI companies just retreated and hid after they got what they needed, like a shy teenager with empty wallet who still craves access culture, with no real attempts to change the system.

Meta is only putting up a token fight because it has been directly sued, but we all know how this ends: they will eventually bend the knee. They accessed human culture for practical, not moral reasons.

That's clear evidence that human culture was sucked dry and is no longer needed. OpenAI won't fight to open access to Anna's Archive because they no longer can get any benefit from using it in training. They can pay reddit and such for trickle of their fresh drivel. But the usefulness of any book ever written ran out some years ago and new ones are just riffs of the old ones so not really worthy of pursuing.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is the present and the future and human output becomes something not worth (or legal) to even cite in any interesting volume.

DMCA only applies to 1:1 copy, if you used AI to convert it to something else, then DMCA is the wrong tool.

It's ultimately a fruitless endeavor to go after because you would have to prove that you can use the said AI tool to create the exact word by word copy and that is going to be very expensive and shaky in court

I think its time that we stop extracting rent from outdated copyright laws. Once AI gets good enough you aren't going to be bothering with them anyway. All copyright law does is put money in the pockets of those that created the law and a portion of that goes to the creator.

Copyright laws are basically tax on the poor.

Haha, it makes me chuckle because we (the humans could make decisions) let this do to ourselves.

Let the humans use the internet however they want to, and now it's the age of AI, so let humans do whatever they want using AI.

I don't have the answers or a remediation plan for this. But could see this coming eons ago.

And the future is only going to get darker from here. May God help us!