Youtube essayist Hbomberguy put out a ludicrously long video essay earlier this month titled Plagiarism and You(Tube). It was entertaining and informative and it has sparked a bit of a firestorm online as people debate what is and isn’t plagiarism. Watch it below.

It got me thinking about the nature of creativity. I have a truly awful memory. My memory palace (what Alan Wake 2 inventively calls a Memory Place) is a decaying ruin of half-remembered vibes built around the pillars that make up Who I Am. I fear that one day they will crumble too.

But that’s not what we’re discussing today.

How my memory relates to the topic of plagiarism is pretty simple, really. I absorb ideas, they sit within me, and then weeks or months or even years later they will emerge from me as if the time between I heard the idea and the time when it actually landed with me was a gestation period for it to spring from me alone.

It’s a problem.

It’s such a problem that when I go to my notes app to check out my listed ideas, I often need to do an internet search to make sure I haven’t simply stolen it from somewhere first. And even that system isn’t foolproof. I wrote an entire outline for a story which I shared with my writing partner Nathan Lawrence, and his response was “oh, you changed some of the details we talked about.”

We talked about it? This was news to me! But Nate had taken notes. They were good notes, too, and after talking about the idea with him more (and apologising for inadvertently cutting him out) I even folded some of the ideas into the story.

I’ve tried to be better about it, but I think my brain isn’t wired that way. I’ve had four hospital-trip-worthy concussions that I can remember. I have abused substances. Whether they were eroded by binge drinking or obliterated by trauma, the pathways that allow me to remember everything simply do not exist.

What I do instead is remain vigilant. I google ideas that I have before I use them. I ask the people I discuss writing with if we’ve touched on an idea before. And where possible, I avoid getting ideas from others at all.

What I do instead is remain vigilant.

Until my Netflix deal comes in or Disney buys my scriptment, I am a professional games writer. I’ve been one for 17 years. And early on in my career I learned that if I didn’t want to ever risk plagiarising anyone, I needed to avoid reading my peers’ work.

The problem there is that you can’t ever improve if you never read anyone else’s work. Also I’m a capital G gamer (in the sense that I live in breathe games, not that I harass minorities) and so not reading my peers’ work made my life miserable. I became a games writer because I love games writing.

So I constructed some safeguards instead. I never read a review of a game I was reviewing myself until after I submitted my copy. Same for previews, and I never talked about interviews until after the questions were asked. It’s compartmentalisation. I could still read the writing I loved, I just had to make sure I didn’t do it when the ideas could incept me.

Harder to safeguard against were the styles of how people write.

See, everyone writes differently. Everyone has their own little quirks and habits as they write, things that are unique to their writing. If you’re an avid consumer of media (and I assume you are, because how else did you arrive here) you can probably pick them out. Things in Matthew Reilly books happen at the last second. Brandon Sanderson spent a few years obsessed with the lee side of hills for some reason. Dan Harmon has been up-front and very detailed in how he likes his stories to adhere to his modified monomyth. Hbomberguy loves a zoom jump cut.

They can be huge structural things, or they can be tiny little poker tells, but everyone has a style.

And I steal them all. You can probably track who I’ve consumed a lot of content from by reading my writing from any given time. When Brando Sando got overly specific with his hill designating, I found myself cavorting down the lee side of a wave in Sea of Thieves. When I read the first three ASOIAF books on a flight to LA and back, I cracked out the Ye Olde Timey Thesaurus to make sure I only ever used extinct words to refer to people like my Nuncles.

I don’t think this is plagiarism. Rewording a sentence is plagiarism, but if I write a lengthy minutes long monologue for a character to deliver that deliberately disrupts the cadence of a show to throw viewers off balance, I’m not plagiarising Mike Flanagan, I’m simply aping his style.

But I know it can be disconcerting all the same. Action Bronson very clearly developed his flow based on Ghostface Killah, enough that the Wu-Tang Clanner wound up being pretty mad about it. But Action Bronson developed the flow out of respect. It was an attempt to honour one of the greats.

He probably shouldn’t have said Ghostface couldn’t rap anymore, but he apologised later.

In Ghostface’s mind, before Action Bronson ran his mouth, he felt he was having his lyrical identity stolen. And the same goes for writers. I’ve had conversations with people who have felt I was stealing their style before, and that’s what it comes down to—when you only exist as a byline at the top of an article, the way you write becomes an expression of your personality, and someone using that same expression can feel like a violation.

I always tried to express that my mimicry was done out of the utmost respect, but I never stopped doing it. I can’t, not really. I toned it down a little, but I still used their style. And as I found other writers who I liked, I stole their style too.

I do this because I don’t think people would like my style. Because I am certain narcissistic self-aggrandisement disguised as self-deprecation has limited appeal.

That’s a taste of the pure me, by the way. Insufferable.

Reflecting on this topic reminded me of a book I read earlier this year, Blindsight by Peter Watts. An incredible, dense book that I started listening to as an audiobook before needing to actually read because it combined words in a way that caused my brain to shut down, Blindsight deals with a lot of difficult moral and philosophical concepts. It’s a fantastic read, and absolutely worth checking out.

One topic it deals with is the concept of The Chinese Room.

I asked Bard AI to explain the concept of a Chinese Room for me because I want to be tortured for millennia in a Roko’s Basilisk and antagonising the AI with questions about the nature of its reality seems like a good way to make that happen. Here’s what it said.

“The Chinese Room is a thought experiment by philosopher John Searle. It imagines a person locked in a room, who manipulates symbols in response to other symbols, mimicking Chinese conversations without ever actually understanding the language. The point is to argue that machines, even if they pass the Turing test (convincingly imitating human conversation), might not actually “understand” or be conscious, but simply manipulate symbols according to pre-programmed rules. It’s a controversial argument, but it raises important questions about what it means for a machine to be intelligent.”

It’s a pretty good summary. So the person locked in the room learns over time to show the mandarin for food “舳” when it wants food, but it’s not truly communicating in Chinese. It doesn’t understand Mandarin, it simply understands that the symbol 舳 results in food being delivered.

And because I’m a goon, 舳 is actually the symbol for poop. Food is 食. Or at least I think it is. I have no understanding of Chinese, I simply fed some symbols to a machine and replicated the symbols that were returned to me.

Which brings me to my larger point. Upon reading Blindsight, I was struck by the unnerving idea that I myself might simply be a hastily cobbled together collection of symbols. A machine built to respond in certain ways without truly understanding them. Forget whether the Turing Test is strong enough to test a Strong AI—if a test was created that could properly determine the consciousness of a machine, could I pass it?

I still don’t know the answer. My style is cobbled together from the “borrowed” symbols of those I’ve loved reading—what if the rest of my personality is the same?

But if we’re all just machines processing symbols and trying to respond with the correct corresponding symbols, then there’s not really any one person’s style, is there. You can’t steal someone’s style if it wasn’t ever theirs to begin with. And if we’re not then I guess I’m a style-jacking scumwad. But I’m comfortable with that. Maybe someone will jack my style, and by that I mean write presciently accurate game reviews that are unappreciated until years after they are published.

Anywho, plagiarism exists and if you do it, you’re scum. I’ve known a few plagiarists in my time, and all of them sucked. And because I love seeding little jokes into things, I should make it clear that  Large Language Models are essentially plagiarism automata, spitting out lines written by other people wholesale in between simply making shit up.Even the Chinese Room example given by Bard AI above is guilty of this.

But it just gets the symbols and spits them out, right? RIGHT?

A writing update. I have two projects currently on-the-go. One is a novel, it is fully drafted and I have an editor for it. It’s a dark Australian thriller with a splash of cosmic horror. The second is fanfiction, which I will publish on this page (or maybe somewhere else)—an Aussie twist on one of my favourite films of all time. That one is currently fully outlined and I am in the process of acquiring some cultural sensitivity resources, as it deals with some heavy topics and I want to treat those topics with the respect they deserve.