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.

 

https://preview.redd.it/v8tgrybkaaoh1.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=759bb63eb93fdb0729f48c87efb721a5747c35c2

*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.*

 

https://preview.redd.it/80kva35laaoh1.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ff91a7965c58c907466ae29366b61df0002ce737

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.

 

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.

 

Johnson floated $199 for an authorized version of his own style, live, on camera. [The actual system for licensing your name before someone else runs it without you](https://jvz3.com/c/2159995/408575) is already built out.

https://preview.redd.it/4h7ee5jmaaoh1.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=20846881261e3795f32a9109ab4329f53d9c6de4



Steven Johnson (Google Labs) just described exactly how to clone a writer's voice without asking