Irony is Thoroughly Dead: "Prompt Plagiarism" is Now a Thing

25 Jan, 2026

"Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts are being Plagiarized" is a headline that was just written and published, about a "problem" that, apparently, someone somewhere is having.

The Mental Gymnastics

"Oh no! The sentences I used to make the Grand Theft Autocomplete machine spit out what I want, on the backs of unpaid labour and boundless amounts of stolen IP, were used by someone else!" ¹

This truly is a bizarre take. It requires so much mental gymnastics to get around the cognitive dissonance stemming from feeling entitled to produce "content" based on absolutely insane amounts of previously stolen content that I am afraid they might pull a muscle.

Now that we've got some people worried about... whatever this <waves hands> situation of "plagiarized prompts" is, can we circle back and take the original concerns brought forward by:

• writers,
• artists,
• people thinking about the broader future of work, art, and politics,
• and others who produced original content and had it scraped up without compensation or acknowledgement, more seriously?

Except those folks actually have a hecking point, as they devoted their time & thinking capacity to human enedavours like:

• producing novel art;
• spending years writing books - whether that's heavily researched non-fiction, and/or excellent fiction based on the human experience that makes you feel human feelings;
• crafting FOSS projects that would make an app or a tool available to others for free; and/or
• sharing knowledge that they had amassed in their human brain pods with others for free.

These aren't petty grievances. They are substantive harms:

• A novelist’s decade of craft repackaged into training data, which is being used to flood online booksellers with fake "works" by fake authors;
• a designer’s portfolio used to "teach" a model enough art so that a mid-level manager can generate the Q1 earnings slide deck eight minutes quicker - or, even worse, for vile humans to create highly unsavoury imagery;
• an open-source developer’s code ingested to build proprietary tools (yet another delicious level of irony).

We now live in an age where human labour and cultural production are being harvested to fuel chat bots and image generators that produce outputs without any attribution, adequate payment, or even a mechanism for meaningful redress.

"It's AI" is the New "With an App"

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have "the stealing of the stuff is fine. The stealing of the stuff built from the stolen stuff isn't fine" on my bingo card for 2026, because grifters be griftin'.

We've arrived at such a bizarre imbalance between what is frowned upon, or even criminalized, on an individual level - you wouldn't download a book, would you!? - and what is allowed because "it's AI." It is reminiscent of all the outrageous things that tech companies can get away with if they only do it "with an app."

However, now that we apparently need to be openly begged to stop being so mean about AI, and it turns out AI maybe doesn't exactly pay off in the way the managerial suite hoped thought it would, and time savings also may in fact be very meager indeed, maybe the shine is wearing off.

We can only hope that maybe this means we can start talking about the tool ² as a tool in rational conversation. Rather than treating it like a god-given inevitability that has always been thus, a decree from the Sun Kings of our time. Maybe then we can start treating dataset practices, compensation models, and rights frameworks as the core issues that they are. Eventually.

Practical Tips

So what can we do to help this along?³ Most of us are not in charge of amending global regulatory frameworks, but there are steps regular folks, like you and me, can take to help reel the conversation and the hype back in:

• Demand transparency from platforms and tools. Prefer those that either avoid AI; that don't shove it in your face at every turn; or that leave it up you whether you would like to use AI or not.
• Listen to writers, artists, political scholars, and other thoughtful voices when they share the issues they see with AI.
• Seek out tech writers and organizations that apply a critical lens to AI reporting, and that don't just parrot press releases from corporations with skin in the game.
• If genAI icks you out, limit your use of it. At time of writing, using genAI is not a requirement for being a fully-fledged human, even though parties with a lot of money and power are absolutely trying very hard to make you believe that it is.
• Speak up! Go on your social network of choice (we're partial to Mastodon, as an example) and share your thoughts. Or boost thoughts from creators you value.
  • Measured voices from regular people are being drowned out in this discourse, which is dominated by folks who have a lot of skin (money) in this game. This may or may not be by design. We have a voice, and we should use it.

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