ChatGPT is running out of money because they haven't actually figured out how to make money with the plagiarism engine they created.
Like to charge, reblog to cast.
$700,000 a day for a year is $255,500,000. So it would take a hair under 40 years to use up the $10 billion.
Because this is so f*cking insane and horrible and disgusting and petty and cartoon villain-ish and LETS ALL BE FILLED WITH UNBRIDLED RAGE TOGETHER
You know what makes me the most upset about the use of AI in our culture? It's not just removing artists from art or devaluing human creativity -- it's treating people like they're disposable.
Oh, you're not that special. We have computers to do that now. If you died tomorrow, we have your image. We have your voice. We have your biometric data. We can just duplicate you, it's no problem. Who needs flesh and blood? Who needs agency and free thought? Who needs the human soul? You're just a tool. And when we're done with you, we'll just toss you aside and find someone else.
Creatives, listen to me, and listen to me good: you have a voice and it matters. There is no one in the history of the world who is exactly like you, in this time or this place. There is no one who thinks like you, acts like you, speaks like you, moves like you. There is nobody else built like you. Nobody else with your unique experiences and outlook of the world. You are a product of history, of culture, of art, of love, of pain, of possibility. Don't let them take that from you.
We live in a dystopia....
If the background actors don't come in for work because they exist virtually then the background costume and background hair and make up and their catering and transport and all the other departments that look after them get cut too. These things have knock on effects...
Please please PLEASE watch this Christmas spot we got in Spain
😍
[video description:
View of a town skyline at dusk in the winter, with the J&B Blended Scotch Whiskey logo superimposed on the picture. A flock of sheep walks from left to right, making baaa sounds, their bells jangling. Some Christmas lights with a star are strung along some telephone poles on the left side of the frame.
Cut to the inside of a house where an older man with white hair is sitting in an armchair reading a paper. His wife comes in and puts her handbag on the side table. She’s on the phone, and quickly moves into another room. A lipstick rolls out of the bag. The older man surreptitiously picks up the lipstick, then sneaks into the bathroom, locks the door, and attempts to apply the lipstick. He is not pleased with the results. He wipes off the lipstick and hides it in a small makeup bag on top of the bathroom mirror cabinet.
Elvis Costello’s song “She” begins to play when the wife walks in, and it plays throughout the video. The first line of the song is “She may be the face I can’t forget,” and as the video goes on we learn why this song is significant to the story being told by the ad.
The older man goes to a small store and buys more makeup. The female shopkeeper gives him an unfriendly glare when he pays for his purchase.
The old man looks at a magazine in his home. He tears out a page about makeup and goes back into the bathroom to experiment with the eyeshadow he bought earlier. He tries the lipstick again and adds some rouge. The result is better, but he’s not quite satisfied.
The man goes to a bus stop. Inside the bus shelter, he minutely examines the eye makeup on the model in an ad on the shelter wall. He jumps away from the ad when another man enters the shelter and sits down. The other man doesn’t seem to have noticed what the older man was doing.
Back in the bathroom, the man experiments with mascara. He likes the result. He puts the lipstick on again, and likes this too. Someone knocks on the door, so he hurriedly wipes off the makeup and hides the makeup bag again.
Scene cuts to the living room, where the man sits in his chair reading the newspaper. He looks over at some family photos. One of them shows the man with his arm around a teenager with short, dark hair.
Scene then cuts to the man’s bedroom. It’s nighttime, and he’s in bed with his sleeping wife. The man sneaks out of bed and back into the bathroom. He puts on all the kinds of makeup he bought: lipstick, rouge, mascara, eyeshadow. He looks at himself in the mirror, all made up, and smiles. Now he’s got it right.
The next day, the man is in his living room, where he hears a car honk outside. He goes and looks out the window. Outside is a group of people greeting each other in the driveway; they are an extended family, and apparently have just arrived at the older man’s house. One of the family members is a young man with short, dark hair. Text superimposed on the screen reads “Alvaro, 26 años,” indicating the name and age of the young man. The scene cuts back inside, where the older man comes away from the window, looking thoughtful.
The family sets the table for Christmas dinner, putting out plates and silverware and lighting candles. The older man goes to Alvaro and gestures with his head. “Come with me.” They go into the bathroom. The older man locks the door, then proceeds to put the makeup on Alvaro with much love and tenderness. The older man is happy with the way Alvaro looks. Alvaro is pleased, too.
Cut back to the dining room, where the rest of the family is laughing and talking together. Conversation suddenly stops and people look up, surprised. The grandfather ushers his grandchild out of the bathroom. She stands nervously in front of her family, her face beautifully done. The family pause, then start to smile. The camera goes close on a man with greying hair and beard. He seems overcome with happy emotion, and seems to be the grandchild’s father.
The camera goes back close on the grandchild, who looks shyly at her family. The name and age superimposed now read “Ana, 26 años.”
A woman with greying short hair stands up and goes to Ana. This apparently is Ana’s mom. She gives Ana a big hug. The mom is crying with happiness and love, and smiles at the grandfather through her tears. The grandfather blinks and seems shy but pleased.
The camera pulls back to show everyone at the table again. The grandfather is standing and leading a toast. Superimposed text reads “La magia no solo está en la Navidad. También está en nosotros.” (The magic isn’t only in Christmas. It’s also in us.)
A series of short close shots. Ana happily raises her glass with everyone else. The grandfather takes his wife’s hand and kisses it. Ana’s dad takes a sip of his whiskey, then Ana’s grandmother goes over and gives Ana a big hug.
There’s a brief shot of a bottle of J&B whiskey, which is on the table with the other dinner things, then the scene cuts to show the grandfather looking at Ana and raising his glass to her, smiling. Ana raises her glass to her grandfather and smiles at him.
Final shot is the J&B logo on a black background with the text “de celebrarnos” (to celebrate us).
/end description]
I cannot actually believe we now live in a world where a whisky company thinks it’s commercially viable to make this ad, and to make it about a grandfather who makes Christmas dinner with a family of very “ordinary looking people into a happy, loving affair, by doing this.
I do not know how to explain how fucking impossible that would have seemed to me twenty years ago when I just realized that possibly, maybe, I wasn’t straight. I cannot explain to you how amazing this is, and how beautiful it is.
This did not just happen, and yes there are people everywhere fighting to take it away but I cannot explain you the change in the overall culture of everything, everywhere that makes this possible.
People protect a woman who is burning her scarf
A little context for those who don’t know: recently a woman was arrested by the Iranian morality police (who enforce mandatory headscarves and other theocratic policies) and died in custody. This has sparked massive protests across Iran.
And she wasnt even arrested for not using the hijab but bc she was using it "incorrectly". So she was even following the law and still got killed.
They have also tried to claim that she died from natural causes, even when she was 22. And they realesed a very fake video as evidence of that.
THIS. For the love of every thing that is good, if you considered yourself a feminist or a progressive of any sort, support Iranian women. It’s not complicated what is happening. What’s wrong with you people.
Welcome to the United States of America where if you want to be safe from guns you die if you want to get a safe abortion you die if you're gay you die if you're black you die if you're a woman you die if you're a POC you die and no one will do anything about it because some stupid cuntrags that are two steps away from tripping on a staircase and dying cling to some dipshit beliefs from over 6 decades ago and decide to make it everyone's problem
It's a fantastic point, but John Boyega's net worth also puts him at $6 million. When he says eat the rich, he isn't safe either...
There’s a pretty big fucking difference between six million and one trillion lmao
Not to mention the way the money was made
An actor being paid for a role / doing some advertising is a world away form a man setting up a cooperate money machine that horrendously exploits workers
This is something I hate SO MUCH about how tumblr talks about money.
Like, I get that famous actors have large amounts of money, some of them are even probably overpaid (I have complicated thoughts about how actors are paid because of the nature of acting as a career), but they are exchanging labor for money, and their salaries are an expense involved in making a movie.
But like... an actor is paid for a job. They’re a worker like the rest of us. Bezos isn’t paid for a job, he’s paid for being the person who owns Amazon and despite being obscenely wealthy, he does all sorts of shitty things and to underpay and exploit his workers, and avoid paying taxes, so that more of the money Amazon generates will be profit (worker’s salaries are not profit, they’re a business expense).
These two mechanisms of acquiring money are fundamentally very different.
The reason why billionaires are evil aren’t because having money is bad, its because to get a billion dollars you have to cheat. You have to take it from someone else. If Bezos paid all his workers and suppliers fairly and treated them well, and paid his fair amount of taxes, and etc, then it literally wouldn’t matter how much money he earned, because he wouldn’t be doing anyone any harm. But its not actually possible to amass a billion dollars (a full order of magnitude bigger than a million) while behaving in an ethical manner.
The last post is everything.
Also wanna say that John Boyega specifically does a lot of proper grassroots good work and actively puts himself in a position where he knows the racists will keep on coming for him, to actively and materially help marginalised communities.
The fact a black man is never able to say a single word without being criticised is not being missed btw.
Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.
I’m an ant biologist and I’d like to point out that ants also spend a significant percentage of the time doing nothing.
Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!
That last part is probably more an ant thing than a human thing, but hey, live your dreams.
it’s also a bear thing, which absolutely explains me
Doing absolutely fuck-all is how antarctic sea sponges live to be over 10,000 years old, so live your best, longest, laziest life.
Remember lions? Fellow apex predators?
Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.
The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.
Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.
How about Orangutans?
Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.
Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-
How about Stone Age people in Europe?
They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)
Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.
Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.
But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?
6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.
Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!
During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.
So what changed?
The industrial revolution, baybe~~
New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.
The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!
THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”
(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)
Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.
Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.
Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.
We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.
Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!
Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”
Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.
In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.
Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.
Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.
“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
id: the original post shares a tweet reading, “reminder that you are an omnivore, a predator, and a pretty big one at that. You are not a bee or an ant. It is, in fact, normal for you to just want to lay around not producing anything. You’re a mammal. Stop judging yourself for not being a hive insect.” / end id
@natalunasans: here’s more of that science you were hoping for.
I worked a cash register in a crappy grocery store on Friday the 13th, the day the schools got word that they were going remote because of the virus.
There were horrible people. I don’t need to go into details because we’ve all heard them or read about them or experienced them firsthand.
But most people were just scared and anxious and trying to take care of their families in spite of bad local and state and national leadership and terrible messaging and limited personal resources. They were intense, but understandably so.
My bosses weren’t great, not on any level, from CEO to shift managers, but that’s not news, most of us have been exploited and abused in our jobs before and during Covid.
We weren’t allowed to wear masks because the store thought it would freak out the customers. Some people quit on the spot, but precious few because it’s not the kind of job you work if you have a ton of options. A woman came through my line and she was wearing a cloth mask with a pretty botanical print. I complimented the design and we bonded over love of fabrics and crafts. She asked about the store mask situation, I explained store policy, she shook her head, left with her groceries, and I kept working the endless line. She was back four hours later with a mask for me. She’d gone home, put away her perishables, sat down at her sewing machine, made a mask for a stranger, and then gone back out into crazy traffic and crowds, just to find me and give it to me. She gave it to me in front of the floor manager, and explained to the manager that she was worried about the employees, and my boss had to let me wear it (out of a weird mental loophole of ‘customer is always right’ even though no other employees were allowed to wear one that day and for a few weeks afterward, which sounds insane, but it’s true).
Another woman had come through with a ton of cheese, really cool fancy stuff. I’m in the cheese fandom so we had a good time chatting. She left with her groceries and I kept working the line. About an hour later, she was back in my line again with more fancy cheeses. I rang her up, bagged her food, handed it to her, and she handed the bag to me and said “This is yours, I’m grateful for all the essential workers but I don’t know how to tell you guys or keep you safe, so I’m just doing this.” She’d put her groceries in her car, gone back into a madhouse, picked out cheese for an anonymous cashier, and WAITED IN LINE FOR AN HOUR so she could give it to me personally.
Toward the end of day, after credit card machines had gone down five times in as many hours (do you know what it’s like a for an entire grocery store to go cash-only for overlong periods of time on March 13 with a building full of scared customers? Do you know how funny or charming or lighthearted you have to be with that many intense people on the verge of freaking out? Sometimes being a cashier is like being a goddamm standup comedienne or therapist or surrogate mom I swear). Anyway, a guy came in toward the very end of my overtime and the card reader went down again and this customer didn’t freak out. He started SINGING. He stood there and sang to me until the computers came back online. I’ll never forget him or his sweet voice or that moment in time, ever.
I know things are bleak right now. I know they’re going to get worse. But I see acts of bravery and kindness all day, every day. Every. Day. People are channeling their despair into personal outreach that doesn’t get witnessed by many people because it’s usually one-on-one type stuff. I do a ton of climate & political stuff, as well as all my odd jobs, so I see a lot of different demographics in a lot of different situations, all of them stressful, and yes, there are sociopathic assholes in all of those settings, but there are ALWAYS always people being good and brave and looking for ways to connect or care for or support other people in a myriad of ways.
I don’t believe in very many things at this age but I will go to my grave defending the goodness of humanity. We may be isolated, we may be headfucked and heartbroken, but we are still fighting the good fight. That’s as real as all the bad stuff.
I laughed so fucking hard at this
(I made a version that should be legible as a bumper sticker and roughly the right proportions. You’re on your own for vectors, I cannot be bothered right now)
The short version:
"Forever Red" by elle1975 (as she calls herself on Fanfiction.net) / by Call_Me_Elle (as she calls herself on AO3, previously elle_grey) plagiarises multiple stories by multiple authors, most significantly my Black Widow origin story "Fearless".
Please support the original authors, rather than this plagiarised work! Your readership, comments and kudos deserve to go to the original authors who actually wrote the words and came up with the ideas, not this thief who just copied and pasted them into her story.
The original stories and authors who have been plagiarised are:
The plagiariser's modus operandi seems to be to "bookmark" the stories that she later goes on to plagiarise, so beware if your stories appear in her bookmark list.
Evidence of around 50 instances of plagiarism in "Forever Red" have been collated and can be found here.
The long version:
A while ago, I noticed that someone called elle1975 had left kudos on my Black Widow origin story "Fearless" on AO3. My username on AO3 is elle1991, so my interest was naturally piqued by this person with a very similar username, so on a whim I decided to check out their profile, just for fun.
What I found was... pretty creepy. Instead of it being an innocent coincidence as I had assumed, it looked like this person had deliberately copied my username and also the way I'd written my bio. What the hell?! I thought. This is super weird. Is this person obsessed with me or something? Why are they copying me?
I decided to check their stories and noticed they were posting a Black Widow origin story. Already feeling suspicious since this person had seen fit to copy my literal name and bio, I decided to give it a read.
Immediately, I recognised certain paragraphs and plot points as being very familiar - because I had written them! I felt sick. This was a story that I had spent a significant amount of time, love and energy writing, and this copycat had just lazily copied and pasted whole sections into her own story. Multiple people have told me, over the years, how much my story Fearless has helped them through difficult times in their lives. It is a story that means a lot to me and the people who it has helped, so it felt gross and distasteful that someone would seek to pretend they had thought of my ideas and take credit for my words.
As I was reading, certain other sentences jumped out as being extremely well-written. On a hunch, I copied and pasted these sentences into Google and what came up was sadly not a surprise. These sentences had also been copied and pasted from other people's stories. So far, using plagiarism detection technology, I've been able to identify four stories which have been plagiarised and incorporated into "Forever Red":
However, plagiarism detection technology is not perfect and will always result in an underestimate of plagiarism, since it does not pick up on all instances of plagiarism (because it relies on the original stories having been indexed by the search engines, which is not always the case). Therefore, there may well be other stories and authors whose hard work has been stolen by elle1975/Call_Me_Elle.
Here are just a few side-by-side comparisons showcasing examples of the plagiarism. In total, I was able to find 50 separate examples of plagiarism, which is far too many to post here, but if you would like to see them all, you can find them all collated here in this Google document.
As well as the above examples where she literally copies people's words, she has also copied multiple plot points and ideas from my Black Widow origin story Fearless, which were entirely original to my story and which I thought of using my own brain (because that's what real writers do). Original ideas that she copied from me include:
What has been elle1975/Call_Me_Elle's response?
When I originally noticed she was plagiarising my work, I left her a comment on Fanfiction.net asking her to remove or edit the plagiarised sections. She deleted my comment, contacted me privately and claimed to feel "awful". However, she did not apologise and did not accept any responsibility for her actions.
Instead, she gave the worst excuse ever: she claims to have a "photographic memory" and that she therefore remembers stories perfectly and "accidentally" writes them into her work because she thinks they're her own words. Which is complete rubbish, obviously, because if she really did have a photographic memory, she would be able to remember (in perfect, photographic detail) that she read it in another person's story and then copied and pasted it into her own work!
Nevertheless, if this is the position she's going to stand by, then the only solution for writers seems to be to ask her not to read your stories, so that your words don't end up in her "photographic" memory of texts that she then conveniently forgets were written by someone else.
If you want to contact her to tell her she is not welcome to read/plagiarise your work, you can find her on AO3 (currently Call_Me_Elle), Fanfiction.net (currently elle1975), Pinterest (currently elenasfakianopo), and email (available on request, DM me).
What can you do to help?
Parts of one of my old Marvel fics has been plagiarized. The evidence is well organized above. Although fanfic has always been just a fun hobby for me, my works do take a large amount of time, effort, and care to write, and it makes me sad that people might take pieces of my writing without my permission. Please don't send the plagiarizing author any hate (most fic writers are young, and although I want them to learn to do better, I don't want them to be harassed). Sharing so you can give the other stories affected some love (especially op, who had a significant amount of material stolen).
