“It seems like he doesn’t know about the Retweet button.”
RIP
In an apparently inadvertent meta-commentary, an artificial intelligence stan seems to have passed off someone else’s tweet as his own — while hyping up AI’s potential for replacing human workers.
“RIP website designers,” begins the tweet posted by Rowan Cheung, who per his LinkedIn is the founder of a newsletter about AI called The Rundown. “This new tool is ChatGPT for UI design. What’s even more amazing: it’s all editable in Figma.”
Embedded in the tweet is a video from Galileo AI, a text generator that can spit out lines of user interface design code that actually launched nearly a year ago, putting it months ahead of ChatGPT as far as release dates are concerned.
The whole premise would barely be enough to register on our radar beyond perhaps an irritated eye roll — except that Cheung appears to almost certainly have copied the tweet nearly word-for-word from another self-described AI enthusiast.
The apparent original version of the tweet was posted by marketing industry expert Lorenzo Green more than two weeks prior, back on February 10 — and as you can see, it’s clear that Cheung’s version is substantively identical.
“R.I.P web designers,” he wrote. “This is basically ChatGPT for UI design AND is editable in Figma.”
Meta, No Zuck
Beyond just being an annoying hazard of using Twitter, this tweet-lifting is also a kind of ironic meta-commentary on AI itself, given that both text and image generators have a nasty habit of copying their source material so closely that it amounts to plagiarism.
Indeed, when Futurism contacted Green, he pointed to Getty Images’ “mega lawsuit against Stability AI” over copyright infringement that accuses the Stable Diffusion maker of “scraping” data from its archive without permission — an ongoing debacle that could set legal precedents for how these sorts of cases are treated in the future.
“The key is in the training data,” the marketing guru told Futurism of the AI scraping issue. “If developers use ethical data sources they shouldn’t have a problem. If they use copyrighted data sources they will have a problem.”
While ripping off a tweet isn’t exactly the same as stealing a company or individual’s intellectual property — which is a very good thing for kleptomaniac meme accounts like Fuckjerry — it’s still a curious happenstance given the current, and currently shifting, public perception of plagiarism in the wake of our apparent AI renaissance.
As for Cheung himself, Green had but one quip: “It seems like he doesn’t know about the Retweet button.”
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