The problem with technology "leveling the playing field"

I recently realized that some of the channels I enjoyed regularly watched on YouTube were content thieves.

There are plenty of tells for AI-generated content — the weird cadence in the speaking, the images being a little too perfect, the thumbnails seeming familiar in their layout. This wasn’t that. I was recommended another video with the EXACT same content. It wasn’t AI-laundered or anything. Same layout, same script, same everything…different channel.

The thing was that this one was the original content owner.

I felt dirty. As a content creator myself, plagiarism is the lowest form of thievery that thrives on the internet. People make a living from doing it, but it doesn’t do anything for them. And it blows my mind that individuals with no morals can profit so easily off the hard work from teams that produce high-quality content week in and week out.

What concerns me the most is that as technology enables better quality, it also enables better scaling, ethical or not. Transcription capabilities make it very easy now to copy entire YouTube scripts and paste them to writing platforms behind a paywall. The sheer submission volume to platforms like Medium publications make it very easy for such material to escape through their review.

Most writers aren’t making videos, meaning that everyone who knew where to look could scrape from different types of media and just use it for their own purposes. My wife loves to listen to stories like true crime and heinous wedding fiascos.

The problem is that most of the narrators aren’t the original writers.

Perhaps I’m overreacting here, and maybe there’s gray area where narration comes in, but unless you’re the author, there should be protections in place for this type of thing. In fact, someone could take this very rant that I’m writing at the moment and read it aloud on a YouTube short, complete with AI-generated images to accompany it, and no one would know.

There’s a difference between reposting with credit to the original content and lifting, laundering, and lying to reap the benefits.

In the words of Peter Griffin: “It grinds my gears.”

I'll get off my soapbox now.