How Is Using Generative AI Not Considered Theft?

Over the course of 2024, I put everything I’ve ever written behind a paywall. It’s not something I wanted to do – it’s something I had to do to protect the value of what I write. I have nightmares about some joker in a basement somewhere using my “vibe” to sell crypto scams to old folks. This isn’t (total) hyperbole. What I just described is merely the worst-case scenario of a very common phenomenon with generative AI, and one that we’re all kind of sweeping under the proverbial rug. I know this because I was working with NLG and generative AI as far back as 2011, before AI ethics were even a thing, and even then I could smell trouble on the horizon. Well, here comes 2025 and here comes trouble. See, a lot of LLMs were created during a wild west period of scraping websites for content without permission. Precious little of that was properly verified, let alone properly attributed. So every time you use generative AI, no matter how altruistic your initiative, you’re running the risk of stealing from other people—writers, designers, musicians, coders, attorneys, et al.—to produce information that may also end up being completely inaccurate. It’s fine until you get caught, right? And honestly, what are the odds that massive intellectual theft is going to get traced back to you? I mean, everybody’s doing it, right? Well, I believe businesses are quickly approaching the not-so-fine line between ethics and penalties when it comes to using generative AI. So if you’re using generative AI to support your business, it’s time to decide whether or not it’s worth it. Google Doesn’t Like Crap Content Regardless of how it’s made, Google is starting to get a little more serious about parasite SEO content – websites that host garbage clickbait content to boost SEO juice, like a sports website running unrelated product reviews. A lot of that content now is primarily being produced by generative AI. In fact, that recent article above (from The Verge) references the case of Sports Illustrated getting caught last year using generative AI. But as I pointed out when I wrote about it at the time, while everyone was (rightfully) blasting SI for using AI, they were missing the point. SI was using AI primarily to write product reviews unrelated to its content, and this was a content scheme it had been employing for much longer than it had been using AI to create said content. So why does Google care now? Enough to inflict major search engine setbacks? It’s Not About the Starving Artists Either Yeah, suck it up, writer-boy! You should be grateful that you get to clickity-clack on the keyboard! Except the problem is bigger than artists. In an article I wrote about how using generative AI works against you, I made a tacit distinction between people using AI as a helper tool and using it to imitate the work of a reviewer that’s actually used the product. Because the latter is more than theft – it’s also lying. And maybe light fraud. But even if you’re using ChatGPT to perfect a cover letter for a job you really need, that doesn’t mean the crime – or transaction, I guess – is victimless. I’ve had offers made to me to scrape all my content and turn it into some kind of advice-slinging Joe-bot. None of them were going to make me rich, or even slightly offset the revenue I’m making from various publishers or readers of my (now) private newsletter. What I’m saying is, it exposes the age-old advice warning: You get what you pay for. So even if you’re using generative AI as a tool, even for the most altruistic reasons – and let’s face it, most folks are just trying to make a buck with it – there’s still a very good chance you’re committing theft, as well as a 100 percent chance that you’re getting only a cheap derivative of someone else’s work. It’s why all my content is behind a paywall now. So it’s not just an ethical quagmire – it’s also a poor value proposition. Free AI Is a Myth There’s no such thing as a free lunch, even a free artificial lunch. And this is where I get speculative and conspiratorial. You might be paying pennies or dimes for access to someone else’s processing power and words, but believe me, the proprietors of that power and those words still want your money. Now, let’s talk about Apple and its 30 percent cut of mobile app revenue. Yeah, it was ridiculously cheap to set up a developer license to get our mobile apps onto Apple’s storefront. They want us to do that, they welcome our business. But of course, anything we create and pump out the other end is going to be subject to almost a third of our revenue going back to Apple. Try not paying that. Ask Epic Games about it. So what happens when these ethical AI problems become capital P Problems? Today, as you read this, there are already various lawsuits underway against proprietors of AI for massive theft (allegedly). And it appears that at least a handful of these are going to be winnable. On top of that, an AI Wall is approaching, which is basically a law of diminishing returns on adding any more data to AI datasets because of limits on processing power and, well, a general lack of demand for more complex logic. And if you want to get super conspiratorial, there’s the spooky case of certain names crashing ChatGPT. The reason why is still under speculation, but it’s clear there is some privacy monkey business going on behind the wizard’s curtain. What do you think happens when the resulting revenue problems hit OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, and so on? My guess is that it’s going to severely impact whatever the end users are using the generative AI for – and I’ll bet the language to be able to impact the end use is already somewhere in those wordy licensing agreements that those end users glossed over (if they read them at all). You get. What. You pay. For. Look, people like me (and please join my email list to follow along) have long pointed at crypto and said, “That’s cool and all, but it’s not money.” Now it’s time to point at generative AI magic and say, “That’s really neat, but it’s stealing.” And eventually, someone is going to have to pay the price. Don’t let it be you. EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM @JPROCO