North Luzon Monitor

North Luzon

DisContent

Valred Olsim
Latest posts by Valred Olsim (see all)

The world has moved on, as they say. It is no longer what it was nor what we expect. The dreams have changed. Ask any wide-eyed kid what they want to do in life and they will gleefully say a “vlogger” or a “tiktok star” or an “influencer” – whatever that means in today’s language.

But really, the currency of a generation addicted and dependent to gadgets is “content”, consumed raw or cooked to a gluttonous digital population.

Original or distinctive content has always been the ideal option for content marketers and creators. Somewhere along the way, this concept crumbled, and everybody wanted to join the gig as digital creators—the less creative opting to copy and reupload originals as their own. What then does plagiarism in the modern world look like? On social media, where individuals and brands alike frequently circulate memes, sounds, and other sorts of information, the line between borrowing and theft can become hazy. Facebook, itself, recently reported that about half of the traffic to Facebook pages went to pages that stole or repurposed most of their content. And to a credulous crowd, the copies who generates the most reactions are considered better than the original.

Even though a huge number of the report’s top-performing pages repeated sensationalized (including sexually suggestive or hyped) content or false information, worse, copied sensationalized and repeated content, the lack of repercussions for the page administrators showed how simple—and potentially beneficial—it is to copy viral content in order to gain a wider social media audience, and profit from it. And yes there is a trend to the content for the shameless: sex, poverty porn, rage-farming, gossips, and stupidity.

Content formats, filters, soundtracks, trends, memes, and other forms are created with the purpose of being copied and/or reused. The issue, however, arises when these copy cats attempt to pass off “original” content as their own. Just imagine these “creators” fishing on the hard-earned bucket of another creator who is genuinely fishing on the lake…you get the picture.

Although content theft is a common online occurrence, the rise of short-video sharing platforms and the competition for followers has created a concerning trend in the creator community, affecting the creative economy, as the thieves even have more followers than the original creators. In some situations, the digital felons are armed with aggressive following at their disposal to wrongfully block criticisms of plagiarism.

As more authors fall prey to this online theft, there is still a miniscule pushback against this practice. Case in point, a “reaction content” which simply puts his reaction video to an original content becomes a content in itself – regardless of how brazen the practice is, legitimizing the unoriginal even more. The social media audience will just shrug it off with indifference: “Eh di gawin mo din kung gusto mo, ang dami pang dada!”

Then there is the content generated by the almighty Artificial Intelligence (AI) Apps. This system can alter, rewrite, re-edit, repurpose and recreate content, even to an extent that it cannot be detected by plagiarism checking programs. Yes, an AI that can copy articles and translate or convert them into video presentations or content, an AI that can gather articles, feed it to a system, and create another article or content. An AI that can copy and improve on content, an unstoppable machine that can create thousands of content absent the human drunkenness and flaws.

So what’s next? I don’t know. The world will end in fire, or in ice and this article content is only an expression of discontent.

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