AI Is Stealing Your Content. Steal It Back.
“It’s like having a genius in your pocket.”
It was the early morning of 3rd December 2022 and my friend Richard had just messaged.
“I was working on a project that was going to take me all day to do manually. I asked OpenAI’s new chatbot to write a program that does it for me. I finished it in five minutes. Insane.”
It was insane. Within an hour, not only had Richard written hundreds of lines of code, but he’d also summarized contracts, come up with ideas for a new podcast series, planned a nonfiction book and got a motivational pep talk in the style of Tony Robbins.
What was this ChatGPT thing?
I created an account and started testing, not sure what to expect.
After typing some prompts and getting a few blog posts out of this curiously friendly chat interface, I started to wonder where the words were coming from.
How did it know what to say about all these topics? Suspicion crept in.
I searched Google for my articles and found one with the title, “How to raise entrepreneurial kids,” that I’d published on Forbes a few years earlier. I prompted the bot with the concept and subheadings from my original piece.
“Hey ChatGPT. Please write me an article titled, “How to raise entrepreneurial kids.” Explain what entrepreneurial really means, then outline a four-part framework for raising entrepreneurial kids including mindset, skills, opportunities and role models.”
After a few seconds, the words started appearing on the screen.
Only they weren’t just words. They were my words.
Multiple exact sentences from my original piece were peppered among a few new ones.
At first, I was impressed, but that quickly turned to anger. I realised that anyone could prompt ChatGPT in this way and get my content. They could publish it themselves. They could pass it off as theirs.
Not cool.
AI is stealing your content
Turns out, other people aren’t so happy with large language models being trained on the entirety of the internet, including their copyrighted works.
Right now, Game of Thrones author George RR Martin and novelist John Grisham are suing OpenAI over claims their copyright was infringed to train the system.
Hollywood has just ended a lengthy strike over technology, with “concerns from both writers and actors that unchecked AI could dramatically reshape Hollywood and undermine their roles, pitting artists against robots in a battle over human creativity.”
Tony Stubblebine, Medium CEO, explained that Medium is blocking its content from AI crawlers, believing:
“AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam internet readers” and they are, “making money on your writing without asking for your consent, nor are they offering you compensation and credit.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agrees that content owners should receive “significant upside benefit” for their original work, and that, “creators deserve control,” but for now it’s up to creators themselves to take control and find those rewards.
The paradox for creators
There is no doubt that LLMs can make you more productive. With effective prompting, not only can you train ChatGPT (and Claude and Bard) to write like you, but you can create the first, second and even final draft of emails, articles, job descriptions, tweets, story ideas, contracts and code very quickly.
With 180 million users spending over 8 minutes on the site every visit, we know that entrepreneurs and creators are using ChatGPT to create, while simultaneously losing control over their own content and being unhappy about it.
So what’s the solution?
In January I joined a mastermind about AI. When I signed up, I thought we’d discuss building cool AI tools and catapulting our businesses into a futuristic way of operating.
Instead, members were nervous about ChatGPT. They were worried about SEO penalties, content copyright, and their freelancers using LLMs without disclosure. Most mastermind members were creators, with their income riding on their sites and content. They had reason to be concerned.
A few sessions in, the 12 of us were asking a different question. Instead of, “Why should I be afraid of this?” we asked, “How can I use this?” We started taking ownership. We looked for ways to leverage the technology, expand our impact and protect our art.
What does the future look like?
If creators don’t figure out how to use AI, it will use them. It will take their content and repurpose it for others’ requests. As LLMs improve, there will be less need for copywriters, authors, screenwriters and analysts. It will be harder and harder to sell knowledge.
After all, how can you sell knowledge when ChatGPT knows everything?
There will be a tipping point where the quality of output from an LLM is so fantastic that people are simply not going to need online courses, books or other content laboriously and imperfectly created by humans. Information will be presented in a more engaging way than podcasts, television shows or even real-life conversations.
At some point within the next few years, you’ll be able to ask an AI program to, “create an engaging 9-minute video that summarises the key points of the American Revolution to entertain a 14-year-old with an IQ of 112.” The video will be created in seconds, without scriptwriters, artists, camera operators or editors. No teacher is required for delivery.
What can creators do?
Only those creators with an innovative way of delivering their unique content will be able to compete with the now global AI giants.
The advantage of an individual creator, especially one who has built a following, is that the information they share is not aggregate. Rather than being generic amalgamated internet content, it’s their style, opinion, character and worldview. It’s trusted by their audience, who want to hear more of what they have to say.
If these creators can use AI tools to help their unique message go further, and get the benefits, they win.
The answer lies in taking ownership. In acting now and creating something that genuinely adds value.
An AI version of you
In 2022 I was working on a project to help creators and entrepreneurs make more money and impact with less time. At the start of 2023 my team and I progressed the concept to incorporate AI.
The new iteration of the project, Coachvox AI, allows content creators of all kinds to ringfence their content and serve their audience, taking ownership while preserving their unique style and worldview.
We started building AI versions of real people: creators, authors, coaches and consultants. We trained AI models with their content, in their style, and set them up to serve their audience. They coach and mentor clients through challenges. The AIs interact based on the content of the person who trained them.
It’s early days for Coachvox AI, but 100 creators (including an astrologer, a running coach, business mentors, a property influencer, computer science teacher and productivity coach) have now made an AI version of themselves, so their message and frameworks can reach more people.
Their AIs generate leads and engage with their audience, and some creators charge a monthly fee for access.
The platform uses OpenAI, but our creators are the heroes. It’s their name, their face, and their content building familiarity, and they retain the benefits with email addresses collected, correct attribution of their work, and the proceeds of leads or sales their AI generates on their behalf.
Stealing it back
Creating an AI version of you is just one way you can take ownership of your content and brand using AI. There are more:
- Empower your team to experiment with tools and see how efficient they can be
- Produce more content and improve the quality, for more eyes on your brand
- Get ideas for marketing, revamp your sales copy, analyse your sales data
The people that do this have an advantage over those that don’t. The people that don’t will be overtaken by AI tools and LLMs. At some point in the future, there simply won’t be demand for less-than-spectacular content delivered in the same old way.
AI poses a threat to creators, but it’s also a gift if leveraged correctly.
AI doesn’t have to be the enemy. Energy spent waging war on ChatGPT is energy better spent figuring out how to combine AI with your art and make it do more.
If you don’t use AI, it will use you.
It’s already stealing your content, so steal it back.
Build the chatbot that impresses your audience. Be the genius in someone’s pocket. Use the tools to expand your reach and help more people, not slowly disappear and wonder how you could have stopped it.
