Jurisprudence will, hopefully, catch up, but for now let's return to the stigma against plagiarism in academia and journalism where stealing someone else's work and claiming it as your own was job-losing, career-ending, shame-spiraling bad. It still is. consigliera.substack.com/p/ai-the-pla...

You can no longer pretend that you don't know where those words come from, that you are not responsible for wholesale adoption of work that someone else assembled word by painstaking word.

If AI serves up a juicy bon mot, a resonant term of art, just drop it into a search bar to see if someone has already used it. If there is IP with that idea, read it, reference and build on it. Be a good steward of the work of others. Don't pretend AI is a very smart stand alone magical genie.

That's ok, writers have always built on the words and ideas of others. But let's bring back the footnote. The graced attribution that says "someone else said this and it is the foundation upon which I am building." A simple number floating next to a word that guides the eye down to the attribution.

How do they manage the cognitive dissonance? Or maybe they have none left. My son was on Medicaid after he was disabled in a car accident. He couldn't speak or walk. Kids on Medicaid often literally have no voice. We must speak for them, advocate for them, make them seen.