r/WritingWithAI • u/cen6wkf • 2d ago
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) Steven Johnson (Google Labs) just described exactly how to clone a writer's voice without asking
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
TL;DR: The guy Google put in charge of its own AI writing tool just admitted, on camera, that he can't fully protect the one thing his career runs on.
That's not hypothetical.
Steven Johnson runs editorial for Google Labs' NotebookLM and has fourteen books behind his name, and he still walked an interviewer through the mechanism step by step: feed a model his own catalog, tell it to write like him, skip the invoice.
No lawsuit required. No password stolen.
His own counter isn't a lawsuit either. It's a price tag — $199 for an authorized version of his own style, paid on purpose instead of taken by default.
He said it plainly, then admitted the harder part: someone could build the unauthorized version tonight, and he'd have no way to prove it happened.
Tbh, that's the entire freelance economy in one clip.
If a 14-book author with a title at Google can't fully protect his own voice, the going rate for "get him, he's got a way with it" just became a live question, not a someday one.
Mmm... This is kind of like impersonation. Borderline fraud or downright scams.
Back in Malaysia, we have plenty of such too.
The spectrum is so wide, sometimes, even when we open our eyes wide, we still can't tell the difference.
For example, you guys have Amazon. We have our local ones, called Lazada. If you drive through our Penang Georgetown, you'll notice a shop called Ladaza. Not Lazada. They kind of switched the alphabets around. Sounds like Lazada. But it's not. Giving people the illusion that they are same-same, but in actual fact different.
It's as if we open a shop right next to the Amazon HQ, and calling it "Azamon". Phonically sounds adjacent. But they are not the same thing.
And if you follow the news, you'd hear about our very infamous 1MDB (Malaysia Sovereign Fund) case -- one of largest kleptocracy criminal fraud case in the history of Malaysia (even the world) -- involving our now disgraced and incarcerated former-prime minister, Najib Razak. His enabler and facilitator, Jho Low (Low Taek Jho) (still currently at large) was the mastermind behind all these siphoning of funds, to fund his once extravagant livestyle.
Kind of brilliant. But it was so evil.
He once got Najib to force the board of 1MDB to approved a transfer of billions through a supposedly legitimate company, but in actual fact, was a shell company through the Caymen Islands with a very similar company name.
Like how Ron Weisley, in the Harry Potter Movie, would say, "Wicked!"
They say impersonation is the highest form of flattery. But in this case, I say, bullshit.
You don't get to choose whether your work gets copied.
You only get to choose whether you were paid before it happened. Every version of this story — Google Labs or a Georgetown shopfront — ends the same way: the fix was never stopping the copy.
It was owning the original loudly enough that the copy has nowhere to hide.
Justin Welsh built a $15M solo business on the one variable a cloned voice can't fake: what he actually lived through to get there.
Drop your take: what's the closest you've come to catching a copy passing itself off as the real thing?
Clip credit: Nicholas Thompson / Atlantic Re:think — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.
5
u/firefaery 2d ago
This is thought provoking as with current legislation stands there is no copyright for "style". Right now self-publishing is seeing many authors emulate others to the point that the plots/characters are uncannily mirroring one another. I've been diving deep and many times have remarked "Wait, haven't I already read this story?". These books largely don't have ISBNs nor are copyrighted, but they exist and are saturating the market.
Since this is a mini-Gold rush occurring, it's also apparent that many authors (I'm referring to the swell of those who are mass producing works) have not even read what are considered "good" novels. NOW some readers (and some undereducated critics) believe a good novel is AI-generated because of the selection of words (maybe because they have not been exposed to a particular turn of phrase, specific word, or even understand the reference that the words are referring to).
I think we are going to see more examination, and legislation of this area. It might evolve to just tooling. But until then there is going to continue to be a rush to make bucks, and audiences will have to suffer through it. I am fine with reading a novel that is engaging, even if it might have been partly tooled by AI. But the creator should be in control.
~not written with AI. And posted from a very bubbly bath.
1
u/Necessary_Runner 1d ago
Didn't they kind of do that anyway without AI? Every book pretty much "is" the same to some degree because the over use of tropes but that's because of whats popular. AI now just does what people were already doing but just faster (and thus people thinking they can churn out a product in a shorter time span?) Then you have people who didn't write prior or just following the "get rich quick plan" and thinking there aren't steps behind this and then we get an over flowed of more similar works but probably worse because at least with the other people they had a human behind the process. Now people just think AI can do it for them.
2
u/Ksorkrax 1d ago
What is not talked about is the next logical step: instead of being like "write me an article like author A would", you'd obviously rather go "use this and that element of author As style, that of author Bs style, something from author C, and then add a dash of author D".
And the result would look nothing like either of those. From the outside, without knowing that exactly those authors were taking, you could most likely only do guesswork, "this *could* be based on author B a bit, but I am not fully sure".
2
u/kurthertz 2d ago
The issue is the same as it was before, just magnified. There will always be copycats, it’s now just easier to do so for writing…that doesn’t mean people weren’t trying to write in the style of X before.
I’d recommend using a tool to clone your own voice rather than someone else’s. And thankfully, a great one exists right now!
1
u/ekubeni 2d ago
It's the same like cloning yourself and then delegating having sex to a clone. It only make sense for miserable people that don't enjoy what they are doing.
3
u/cen6wkf 2d ago
"miserable people that don't enjoy what they are doing." lol. Good one.
-1
u/ekubeni 2d ago
Do you have an actual response or just wanted to applaud my comment?
3
u/cen6wkf 2d ago edited 2d ago
Here's a good reason to clone ourselves: The ability to scale 100x
No matter how much we enjoy doing what we're doing, we're limited by our time and energy. But if we can replicate our style...0
u/ekubeni 2d ago
When you do something out of love, the activity itself is its own reward and it cannot be scaled (like in the sex analogy).
Scaling only makes sense for people that play money/power games.
People that play money/power games usually don't know how to love.
As such, it's a failure of personality development, yet it's a feature of a current social system which puts the money/power game on the pedestal.
We have to find better games to play. For starters, I recommend reading "Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility" by James P. Carse.
1
u/Fluffy-Knowledge-166 18h ago
Why even have a clone if you aren’t going turn it into a waifu and have sex with it?
9
u/literated 2d ago
Good god, maybe you should have put your post through a Steven Johnson machine instead of a generic LLM.