Introduction: The Line Between Learning and Stealing

Well, hey there. Welcome back. And I really mean that. I’m really glad you’re here. I’m really glad that you enjoy my vast library of information. In fact, I want you to do whatever you want with it. If you can accomplish something or understand something, in fact, there’s really no limit to what I would like you to do with the information.

Except for one thing. And that one thing is steal it.

What Actually Constitutes Stealing in the Age of AI?

And you might say, well, Mark, it’s free. You’re already giving it away for a steal. Oh, I gotcha there. That was clever. Here’s the thing. If you use the information for yourself, that’s not stealing. If you use the information to improve something or to learn, or if it acts as a springboard in which you can say, hey, Mark mentioned that thing, I’m going to go look it up further and go do a, you know, go dive right into that, that’s not stealing.

However, if you essentially cut and paste my information into AI and then post the result as your own, that’s stealing.

The Unique Stamp of a Creator: Why Authenticity Matters

Now you could say, well, look, lots of people come up with information relatively at the same time, right? So someone could come up with something around the same time someone else does, or there might be 20 people posting about the same time. Well, that’s fine, of course. If all 20 people did their research and due diligence, you’re going to see the flavor of that person on each post. I would like to think that each and every post that I make, each and every podcast episode, every book that I write has my stamp on it. It has my signature. You know that Mark Bradford wrote that.

And for it to have that signature, there’s going to be good and bad, right? You may find that these episodes are rather dense and you would like someone to talk a little slower. You might also enjoy the fact that I have a format of sort of discover, raise awareness, and then kind of give you a tangible thing to take away.

AI Generation vs. Iterative Creation: Putting Heart into the Work

But it’s me. And I do this stuff from scratch. I mean, let’s talk about AI a little bit. Even when I generate some images, I spend way too much time on what is basically an image that people on Spotify and YouTube and iTunes probably aren’t going to see. And yet I still spend all of that time. And when I generate an image, I don’t just say, hey, give me an image of somebody doing this. No, I spend way too much time adjusting and iterating and iterating and iterating. And I did a podcast episode called Live Life Iteratively, and we talk about that there.

The truth is I put my heart and soul into these things. Ultimately, I want you to benefit from it. I want you to be wiser and smarter. I want you to have a spark because of something I said.

But when someone takes that, they take what you have written and they obviously put it through an AI slop machine only to repost it, that’s stealing. It’s a bunch of other things too. But it’s stealing.

The Impact of AI on Non-Creative Professions

If you’re not in the creative space, you may either doubt what I’m saying, or you might think, well, I can’t really relate to that. But you can. Even if you’re not in the creative space, and I typically argue that everyone’s in that space, there are still things that are uniquely you. And those aren’t things that only you find at home. Those are things that manifest themselves in your job. And if you’re successful at what you do, part of that success is probably because you do it your way.

All of the fungible pursuits are still affected by this. Even if you’re in banking, or real estate, or dentistry, or sales, you’re still going to bring what is uniquely you to the table. It’s going to give you an advantage over other people, and it’s going to be something that people recognize you by.

Experience Equals Wisdom: The True Cost of Duplication

You may sell something that is in no way remotely interesting to people, but you make a good living at it. And you’ve figured out a way to sell that. You’ve figured out a way to connect to other people, to potential clients, in a way that gives you a lot of success. And it was probably done with blood, sweat, and tears. You probably had to figure this out after a while. And as I say, pain equals experience, and experience equals wisdom. So you have this wisdom that you painfully acquired.

If someone comes by and copies that, you may say, well, it was eventually going to get out. But if somebody copies that and says, hey, I’m unique in this way because I do this thing… You would then say, well, no, you’re not unique. Now you’re a duplicate because you just stole the thing that I do.

The Dirty Secret of AI Training Models and Piracy

I’m not even talking about patents, trademarks, and copyrights. I’m talking about systems and things and ways of communicating, and ideas that people can come up with independently.

The age of AI brings with it a lot of ups and downs. In my opinion, a lot more downs than ups. And when people adopt technology, technology tends to just magnify something that they’re already experiencing.

How AI Amplifies Our Basic Instincts and Desires

If someone’s a thrill seeker and they have a car, but they get a fast car, well, that’s going to amplify their seeking of that thrill in a way that’s pretty obvious. If someone’s desperately seeking status and attention, and AI comes along, well, it’s going to basically enable that. Like a drug dealer saying, hey, the drugs are now free, just click this button.

You’ve seen it before. You’ve seen the memes about the flyers. How every flyer looks the same. And they call them the “boomer AI flyers” because they are. Typically older people who have adopted AI and just marvel and are thrilled at the fact that they can type a few things into it and get a flyer. But the flyers all look the same.

The creative space has always been a difficult place to enforce ownership and rights. In fact, even when AI came along and was trained on books, do you think those books were paid for? A lot of them weren’t. The dirty secret of AI is that a lot of the books that main AIs were trained on were pirated.

Generating Art vs. Imitating Artists: An Ethical Distinction

Let me be introspective and objective. Now, as I’ve said, I use typically Midjourney and spend many hours, probably too many hours, generating and regenerating and adjusting images over and over and over again just so that I can get the proper image to invoke the proper emotion, at which time I then overlay all of my text and spend way too much time deciding on a stupid font, etc., etc. So I spend way too much work on that.

But I’ve generated an image. And those images are drawn from the works of artists. I could say, show me an image of two people shaking hands as if Van Gogh painted it. And it would do it. It would do it in such a way that would be fairly believable. Now, Van Gogh would never paint that, but now you’ve created an image as if you’re that person.

I don’t sell that image though. I don’t sell that image as if I created it. I generated it, but I didn’t create it.

There’s a vast difference between using that as a background, as an icon for one of my podcast episodes, and finding someone online, perhaps someone I know, and taking a picture of their painting, feeding it through Midjourney, and saying, make a painting just like this one. And then me posting it as if I did that.

Do you see the difference?

Actionable Advice: How to Avoid Becoming “AI Slop”

And again, I can feel in a lot of your brains that you’re going, well, look, this just doesn’t affect me. I don’t care. But it does affect you. And again, if you’re not in what you think is a creative space, there are still aspects of what you do, your productivity and your output, that are going to be affected by AI. And if someone then uses that as a proxy, you’re going to be in trouble. You’re going to be without a job, and you’re going to fight tooth and nail to hang on to what makes you you. I’m telling you, it doesn’t feel good when that happens.

So this is the part in the episode where I tell you what to do, or I say what can we do, right? So what can you do? Well, we raised awareness of it, so be mindful of this. And if you’re mindful in a way that you weren’t before, you’re going to see in areas where people after a certain age post a lot of this, you’re going to see it. It’s all you’re going to see. All you’re going to see is this, as referred to as AI slop, over and over and over again.

Personally, you should avoid anything that decides it wants to take the place of your frontal lobe. And I did a podcast episode on that, and there’s an MIT study in which people don’t think for themselves. They just went, oh, okay, I’ll just ask the AI for that. Give me a bullet list of five reasons why blah, blah, blah. And now I’ll post that and shove that in peo...