A YouTuber’s deep dive on plagiarism tries to make viewers care when creators steal content.
Copying has always been a part of internet culture. Sometimes it’s ethical, sometimes not. It’s almost always incentivized: Once social media began reshaping online life, copying became a go-to tactic for getting views.
When copying crosses an ethical line, we generally call it plagiarism. And plagiarism is thriving online as well. Get good enough at it — and don’t get caught — and you can make money by simply lifting the hard work of someone else and packaging it as your own. With so much content online, plagiarism can sometimes simply outrun efforts to detect it. The rise of AI-generated content is only piling on to this existing problem.
It’s easy to see how we got here. Memes work by copying and tweaking an existing idea, sound, or image. Viral “challenges” ask people to film themselves literally doing the same thing as someone else, from pouring ice water on their head to performing specific choreography to a song that just blew up on TikTok. If social media success thrives on creating things that other people will want to share, then what better way to ensure clicks than by doing the same thing that worked for someone else?
The line between imitation and plagiarism should be clear. Bad actors try to benefit when it’s not. In the maximalist decor DIY space earlier this year, one influencer publicly accused another of copying her project videos, when it appeared that the two creators may have just happened upon some of the same design trends at the same time. And over the weekend, I watched a nearly four-hour YouTube video hosted by Harry Brewis, who posts as Hbomberguy, that laid out how optimized copying becomes plagiarism, a video that spent a great deal of time analyzing one video essayist in particular: James Somerton, a queer YouTube essayist.
The plagiarism allegations against Somerton are pretty grim in this video, and include instances in which Somerton appeared to copy text from academics working in queer culture and history, a book and documentary on the history of LGBTQ people in film, other queer YouTubers, and essays published across the web, including, it seems, at least two articles from Vox. But one thing struck me about how Brewis approaches this topic: It’s not taken as a given in this video that his audience will care about stolen content.
About 40 minutes into the video, Brewis addresses this directly, telling his viewers that, in part, you should care about plagiarism on YouTube because “internet video isn’t a silly playground where teens pretend to be scared of scary horror games anymore. It’s a business.” Plagiarism of and among creators is stolen labor.
This all brings to mind probably the biggest intellectual property story of the year: How copyright law applies to AI-generated content. A federal court ruled against someone who tried to copyright a piece of art created by generative AI earlier this year, writing that so far “no court has recognized copyright in a work originating with a nonhuman.” Generative AI companies have been hit with a number of class action lawsuits arguing that they have unethically lifted from published works in their training data. But the issue is not settled, and as Axios notes, the volume of work generated by AI is vastly outpacing attempts to decide who gets to profit from it. And while there are plenty of people worried about all sorts of things AI might do, it seems even trickier to get a plagiarism accusation against a machine to stick.
Brewis’s video convinces users to care about Somerton’s apparent plagiarism by looking at who gets harmed: in this case, the less-famous queer writers and YouTubers whose work was seemingly lifted for Somerton’s videos. These writers, Brewis notes, are often not compensated or credited adequately for their ideas in the first place. Having a creator who also is part of the LGBTQ community steal from his peers in order to earn money for himself is a community harm.
There’s no equivalent for AI. AI isn’t part of a community or an occupation that has ethical standards to apply. It might be wrong for a generative AI tool to train on and essentially copy creative works without compensation or permission, but the creators of tools like ChatGPT are generally not participants in the communities they are lifting from in order to train their systems. Perhaps that’s why a lot of the bigger conversations about AI and plagiarism right now seem to focus on students using AI-generated writing to plagiarize their papers.
But AI, like YouTube creation, is a business, run by people who are making money off of its use, including by cheating students and by well-meaning users whose DALL-E prompts might accidentally generate a copy of a work by Greg Rutkowski. Although the legal and ethical issues surrounding these two spaces sound very different, they’re both essentially about stolen labor.
Somerton has seen some short-term consequences from Brewis’s video. He’s lost 50,000 subscribers in the past month, according to SocialBlade, mostly in the past few days. His Patreon and X accounts are now inaccessible. His YouTube channel remains live. Meanwhile, Brewis’s video has nearly 6 million views as of the afternoon of December 6. Does that mean Brewis successfully made people care about plagiarism on the internet?
Perhaps for a little while, at least. The idea that someone would have to make the case to care about online plagiarism implies that, historically, scandals like these have been survivable for creators. Jonathan Bailey, a writer who tracks online plagiarism for Plagiarism Today, said he was “confident” that Somerton, along with another creator discussed in the video, would at least attempt to reignite their careers after attention moves on.
A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
A Haley-Christie alliance emerged. But it’s a long way away from threatening Trump.
Time is running out for the Republicans who want to stop Donald Trump. The Iowa caucuses are six weeks away, and the former president continues to have large leads in polls of both national and early state Republican voters.
So naturally, the four challengers to Trump who debated in Tuscaloosa on Wednesday spent the vast majority of their time sniping at each other — with each continuing in the quest to become the one true Trump alternative.
Lately, Nikki Haley has seemed to be the emerging leader in that race for second place — a surprising change from most of the year, when Ron DeSantis held that position. The new status quo became clearer Wednesday night, because both DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy were laser-focused on attacking her in increasingly nasty ways.
These attacks didn’t seem to do much to reverse Haley’s rise — a rise that, we should remember, has moved her from “very far behind Trump in polls” to “very far behind Trump in polls, but slightly less so.”
Winner: The Haley-Christie alliance
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
When a new frontrunner — in this case, a frontrunner for second place — emerges, they get a target on their back. That was clear from the debate’s opening minutes, in which both DeSantis and Ramaswamy attacked Haley as beholden to big donors. (She had a ready response, saying they were just “jealous” those donors were supporting her and not them.)
But the attacks kept coming, posing the risk that this debate would be a pile-on in which everyone tried to take Haley down.
The fourth candidate onstage, Chris Christie, prevented that from happening. After Ramaswamy needled Haley on her support of arming Ukraine, insisting she wouldn’t even know the names of key regions in the conflict, Christie jumped in, calling her a “smart, accomplished woman” and scorning Ramaswamy as the “most obnoxious blowhard in America.”
It was an interesting move from Christie, who barely qualified for this debate and whose campaign seems to be headed nowhere, since polls show that most Republican voters loathe him. Christie also took on DeSantis at one point, needling him for refusing to give a straight answer on whether Trump was mentally fit to serve another term in office.
Christie is clearly friendliest toward Haley of the remaining contenders — she, like Christie himself, spent her key years in politics in the pre-Trump GOP. Christie is also still getting about 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire polls. Might he, at some point, decide to drop out and give Haley an endorsement boost at an important moment — just as he did for Trump in 2016?
Winner: Far-right conspiracy theorists
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Someone who has not been doing so well in the polls lately is Vivek Ramaswamy. Since an initial surge of interest in him, his poll standing has dropped. So it was apparently the right time for him to launch into an absurd recitation of conspiracy theories Wednesday — why not?
“Why am I the only person, on this stage at least, who can say that January 6 now does look like it was an inside job?” Ramaswamy asked. (Back here on planet Earth, what happened on January 6 was that Donald Trump’s months-long plot to steal the election from Joe Biden exploded into violence as his supporters stormed the US Capitol.)
Ramaswamy continued by complaining that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by “Big Tech” — apparently yet another complaint about how stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop were treated. (Decisions by Twitter and Facebook to briefly limit the spread of stories about Hunter Biden’s personal information, in fear that they were disinformation spread by hackers, were ill-judged, but there’s no evidence it swung the election.)
He also endorsed, by name, the “great replacement theory” beloved by white supremacists that the left is secretly plotting to “replace” the US’s white population with minorities — claiming this was a “basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.” (It is true that Democrats like immigration and diversity, but the “great replacement” theory typically is conceived of as a plot to perpetuate “white genocide.”)
It’s not clear whether this would get Ramaswamy more votes, though it could get him more attention from the most influential right-wing players who like this kind of stuff: Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson.
Loser: Small-government conservatism
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
At one point in the debate, attention turned to one of the right’s favorite topics — whether the government should ban gender-affirming care from being provided to trans children.
Christie offered a lengthy, thoughtful, and impassioned response that such care shouldn’t be banned. He argued that Republicans should stick to their small-government principles and that it’s parents who should decide what their kid needs.
“No one loves my children more than me,” Christie said, questioning why Americans should put their children’s health in the hands of “jokers down in Congress” or “some government bureaucrat.” He said he wouldn’t agree with every decision parents would make on this topic, but they should have the right to make them.
After he was done, DeSantis jumped in, yelling: “As a parent, you do not have the right to abuse your kids!”
The crowd went wild.
Winner: Donald Trump
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Scott Olson/Getty Images
Every minute when all these candidates are attacking each other and not Trump is another minute where Trump has gotten closer to becoming the GOP nominee again. The candidates spent much more time attacking each other than Trump, so he wins again, and his decision to skip the debates — maddening as it is — is vindicated again.
Haley may have done decently enough, but the battle for second place is still for now a sideshow that hasn’t seemed to pose any real threat to Trump.
Increasingly, civilians are running out of safe places to go.
Following a seven-day ceasefire, Israel resumed its bombing campaign in Gaza as part of its effort to, as its defense minister put it, “wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth,” warning civilians to evacuate to “safe zones” to avoid being killed. Such directives, however, are growing increasingly difficult to follow. As a revealing statement from the UN children’s agency, Unicef, makes clear, places safe from violence in Gaza — that also have the resources people need to survive — are not just scarce, they’re virtually nonexistent.
“There are no safe zones in Gaza,” James Elder, a Unicef spokesperson, told the BBC. “These are tiny patches of barren land. They have no water, no facilities, no shelter from the cold, no sanitation.”
Elder’s quote underscores the limitations that civilians in the region now face because of the Israeli government’s military offensive and because of longstanding restrictions on people’s movement. All told, Gaza is 140 square miles, smaller than a third the size of the city of Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Times. Its residents are limited in their ability to leave Gaza due to an ongoing blockade the territory has been under since 2007 and because Israel and Egypt, its two bordering countries, have refused to take in refugees. Mobility is also challenging since airstrikes have damaged roads in the territory and fuel remains extremely scarce.
After Hamas killed 1,200 people and kidnapped over 200 people on October 7 in a brutal attack that devastated Israel, the country declared war on the militant group that oversees Gaza.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokespeople have repeatedly said the military is following international law in its air and ground war in Gaza; critics, however, have questioned those claims. Last week, an investigation from +972 and Local Call showed that Israel’s “expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before” all seem to have exacerbated the deadliness of the war.
Israel also claims it has given people adequate warning to evacuate areas that it’s targeting, though there have been questions about the efficacy of such systems. As the Washington Post reports, the country has used “airdropped leaflets, calls and texts” in order to point people to supposedly safe areas. Poor internet and cell service in Gaza, however, have meant that many civilians don’t receive these messages. Additionally, the messages can be confusing and contradictory: As the military onslaught has intensified, areas previously designated as safe no longer are.
Furthermore, any new safe zones the Israeli government has identified, including a strip of land called al-Mawasi in the south, are poised to face severe overcrowding as tens of thousands of people are squeezed into an “airport-sized area,” per Al Jazeera. In one case, a refugee shelter in central Gaza designed to hold 2,000 people was holding 37,900 displaced people, the UN said on November 23. So-called safe zones like al-Mawasi also lack basic resources like food and water, fueling concerns that many people staying there will die from disease, if not violence.
“If you are going to forcibly evacuate people, you cannot send hundreds of thousands [of] people to places where there is no water and no toilets. I genuinely mean no toilets. Every corner I had turned to, there was another 5,000 people who would appear overnight. They don’t have a single toilet, they don’t have a drop of water,” Elder said of his experience visiting Gaza. According to a physician Elder spoke with in Gaza, “safe zones will become zones of disease.”
As a result of these developments, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is entering an even more severe phase following the ceasefire. Since the October 7 attack, Israel has relentlessly bombed Gaza, with the exception of the multi-day pause in late November. Its airstrikes and ground offensive had killed more than 14,000 Palestinians prior to the ceasefire, according to the Gaza Media Office.
Nearly 1,700 people have now been killed since the ceasefire ended, a stark death toll that has been caused, in part, by the fact that civilians in Gaza increasingly have nowhere left to go.
Why the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is getting even worse
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has been dire for weeks. Many of its hospitals have closed. Insufficient aid has been allowed inside. Food and water supplies are dwindling, and fears of infectious disease are growing. According to a United Nations estimate, 1.9 million of the 2.3 million people in Gaza have been displaced since the beginning of this escalation in October.
Roughly 1 million people have been displaced from the north following the bombings in north Gaza in October and November, according to Al Jazeera. Israel is now targeting its airstrikes and ground attacks in the south as well, including in areas it previously directed people to evacuate to in Khan Younis and Rafah. These attacks are spurring yet another wave of casualties and displacements, as people struggle to find new safe zones.