How can we counter idea theft and stolen credit in the age of AI?

[circuitbored]

I've posted opinion pieces here and many other places online a few times and quickly noticed paraphrased clones of my ideas sometimes emerge soon after (that subsequently reach the front pages on some sites more than I'd like to discover as well)

I also post here because the stats on viewership here are usually more honest, and this site provides an unobstructed view of the content I wish to share without ads and manipulation that obscures my message. On social sites, the posts I make now more than ever languish mysteriously with low viewership often within minutes of posting, and posting on social media (simply put) has never matched anywhere near to the reach/visibility that my posts achieve on this site.

It's not a complaint, but more so an observation... The posts here aren't generated by Ai... I'm old school, I prefer to type my own words. I probably wouldn't feel very authentic if I just plugged a topic into a site and got back an article that's extracted and extrapolated from God knows where else online every time I wanted to make a post here, that would feel like cheating.

Many times it seems as if I get many followers on social sites like Twitter and TikTok that follow just to observe and siphon ideas as well. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Are we getting to a point where we'll need to be more secretive about our opinions and ideas because of Ai and people who are leveraging it to copy others?

We each have volumes of ideas, pictures, even plans and prototypes that we've posted online at times to share with friends and strangers in hopes of gaining simple feedback or for momentum behind those ideas. Even though EULA's reduce our ownership of those ideas, there is at least a duty that should precede misuse of that information by others, and a need to properly credit the source of unique and original ideas that can be proven to be originally owned by their creators.

That volume of ideas that many of us curate on social media, on editorial sites, on blogs, and in many other places has now been buried in a sea of other content and ideas, and now more than ever as Ai crawls online resources and parses it together in new ways for other people to post, many have found that it's often paraphrasing and slicing our creations into new (derivative) works. As Social Platforms bury our ideas in favor of what's posted more recently, it's all to easy to lose track of individual creators (those who aren't famous). In many cases, even the prominent and famous creators that are credited for amazing ideas are found to have derived their ideas from others who were less popular, presenting the derivative ideas and creations as totally their own work.

The ideas, photos, memories, music, videos, and other content we share/post has great significance to each of us. Many of the sites that host these applications we upload to have completely lost this plot, and many simply don't even care in favor of running ads, pleasing investors, and in attracting celebrity personalities to be more important than everyone else. The message to platforms should be that instead of luring people in to be manipulated, they should perhaps just run a TV channel instead, that way they don't have to deal with the practice of deceiving individuals into feeling that they can effectively contribute and succeed on each platform... I've observed very functional tools turn into graveyards because product owners neglect individual contributors. I've also observed many new social media ideas overrun with fake accounts to try to feign that they are lively communities of actively engaged users. At the end of the day, a lot of social platforms start out wooing users, but once they go public, they fall onto the horrible practice of neglecting their user base and turning towards only the most popular personalities, which simply encourages regular users to lick their wounds of wasted time and stop logging in altogether. It's at points like that where the top creators on platforms often run out of ideas and begin to feed off the ideas of others, and the entire experience of a social platform can become annoyingly redundant, full of mediocre content, and bereft of honest social activity.

At some point we'll need to hold platforms encouraging and profiting off of suppressing original (independent) idea creators responsible for what it does, as these days fostering and encouraging that behavior can prove to be very profitable for not only frauds and scammers, but also very profitable for the platforms that enable, encourage, and promote idea and content thieves, no matter how popular they are.

It's going to become increasingly complex to negotiate copyright issues now that "Ai" tools (that sample pre-existing online content and ideas) are being deployed everywhere... As people talk about Ai replacing jobs, it's also killing independent opportunity as Ai can be used to steal credit from original authors of ideas.

If independent authors and content creators suddenly went on strike and unpublished the majority of their work, that could potentially send a powerful message to the people exploiting online idea sharing, it could also devastate a lot of services that rely/profit on/off of those free data sources. As we are authors of many ideas, there should be a sense of companies that run Ai tools to be fully transparent, as well as wholly responsible for moderation, concerning their data sources. We're long overdue for a new solution to giving better acknowledgement and accurate credit to authors of original ideas.

We can remix and reinvent ideas, especially ones that are already credited in popular forums, there's always great ways of doing that, the biggest issue is found in both well known and even unknown authors and creators stealing and hijacking ideas from other unknown and small (independent) authors and creators, it's a practice that undermines opportunity for us all, and destroys the ability for each of us to be original and noteworthy, something that everyone should have a stake in upholding if they truly understand how success should work.

The next time you see a bootlegged screen shot of a Twitter post made on a different (name) account, or on TikTok if you see a post mangled into a video frame with nothing more than a totally different and unrelated video embedded under it, it's probably not posted on the original account it was created by. Don't click like on obviously stolen or hijacked content, countering idea and content theft means finding the original author and clicking like on the original post, by the original author.