"I made this" dot meme.

See? Shaka, when the walls fell.

Yeah I mean if he's presenting them as ideas he came up with that's intellectual fraud which it seems like most people are uncomfortable with. To some extent we are all living in a soup of ideas and we're just synthesizing from a lot of the same sources and riffing on a lot of the same inputs. But if it's systematic and specific and presented as ideas he came up with then yeah.

I think a lesser form of "intellectual fraud" many of us are guilty of is speaking too authoritatively about things we're not deep experts on, that's why it's always uncomfortable to get called out on things we're wrong about like that. Even things like citing concepts from books we haven't read/etc are kinda "intellectual fraud".

The concept of intellectual fraud is a really interesting one though because it's very ill-defined in general. Academics believe self-plagarism is intellectual fraud, you are presenting ideas constructed for another intellectual exercise as being ones for this exercise, you should independently construct each work or cite your prior works. I kinda feel like that one's a bit bullshit, that you can plagarize your own ideas. Ideas evolve continuously and I think it's a little weird to atomize their development like that.

The idea of "you stole my meme, you should re-attribute when you re-post" is an interesting one that cooked for a bit there too. Like half the time who even knows where a meme came from let alone randomly crediting users every time it's reposted. I think in general it seems things like removing watermarks is going a little far but some people also go nuclear with the u/biggusdickus @xXxBD420xXx ON TWITTER stuff too, and it's also kinda crass with the way memes derive and are remixed to think you own an idea forever. Derivative works in copyrights are really another one where the law is kinda weird, I think we have this sense that Disney doesn't own your star wars slashfic because it's a derivate work, but it do be like that, even your additional creative input is subordinate to that original conceptual ownership. And that really feels weird and out of step.

That's one of the reasons AI gen is awkward too, it's like an exam question of the most impossible chain of intellectual ownership. Who owns the ideas, the person whose stuff was used to train the net and was riffed upon? The company who built the net itself and tuned/trained it etc? The person coming up with the ideas for the prompts and curating/editing the results? Actual artists are influenced by each other all the time, who owns the idea of vintage anime artstyle or whatever, (forgetting assignment of copyright) does some artist from the 80s have social-intellectual ownership of gundam or whatever? how about Touhou? How is a neural net different, and who really owns the ideas? Like, you go to college to learn to mash up ideas gooder and come up with some new twists of your own, and neural nets can do the "ok now draw daft punk in the style of 1980s gundam" art homework assignments now.

(really it's sort of like raising a kid, yeah the parents did a lot of it but the kid is also kind of their own intellectual entity, and the exact behavior will depend on trained responses to a particular life scenario ("prompt").)

Intellectual ownership is a super interesting concept, like don't we all own these ideas we're discussing right now? is it some star trek TNG writer, because they wrote the proto-meme that sparked our discussion 30 years later? Which neuron initiated the wave, and does it even matter? (stolen meme: which pebble causes the avalanche?) Like physically it isn't even one thing, it's brain waves, neurons firing themselves in self-organizing clusters. Can you say who owns a meme? (which version?) Like yeah if it's a bunch of direct stolen quotes that he's presenting as his own that's easy, but, the concept of intellectual ownership (and the accompanying intellectual fraud) is really interesting and fuzzy in human society. derivative works are a sticking point in mapping onto our ideas of "ownership", and we intellectually derive all the time as a matter of course of life, sometimes inappropriately (like the "talking authoritatively about things you don't know all that well" thing). Our brains are information summary generators right down to things like daily routines, and that's inherently "derivation" of information in the ownership sense. Who really made any of that, which neuron is the "brush your teeth or they'll fall out" neuron and is that owned by my parents or by the dentist or by university biology, or some dead guy from the 1900s who invented the toothbrush? Which neuron was the one where I got good at python, and how much of that weight is from being good at C#/java? We are just giant idea machines that riff off what's worked, constantly, deriving and mashing up ideas is all we do.

Ideas are weird and "I own that" really doesn't work for derivation, we have this inherent idea that if we add enough of ourself to it then we have at least some ownership of something that's not subordinate to someone else's ownership. Our ownership of the idea is intuitively relative to how much we add vs re-use... and that is our society-organism's gradient descent. ;) And maybe that gradient-descent is why the idea of your friend claiming those ideas as his own is offputting, or getting caught lacking on something you don't know well that you spoke too rashly about - it's an error in the backprop, if you will, and socially we know that and that's why it's taboo. It's fine to estimate the backprop a bit wrong (some fuzz even can improve results!) just try not to fire grossly wrong too much or in an adversarial fashion.

(and in this model... self-plagarism isn't really a thing. I cited me, that's who I'm always citing, there is no error in the social backprop there, that's why it doesn't really "feel" wrong.)

Memes as elements of cultural communication are interesting in that light because there's an explicit physicality to it that isn't present in just a raw idea. We definitely have a cultural idiom for "that's my image you can't steal it", despite it actually being a token/stimulus/idea itself in our culture ("the sign becomes its own pure simulacra" dot meme). Because that intentionality is also present in any act of creation. Art doesn't have to be good art, it just has to be trying to communicate a message, and the element implicit to that act of creation is really intentionality.

Just a random interesting tangent I've been thinking about lately. Completely independent idea with no input from current events or anything else happening or being discussed by anyone else - original idea do not steal. You're all on notice, better cite your shit, cause my ownership of those ideas is clearly the most significant! /s

(anyway the real meme weapon was Metal Gear all along. The Orange, pretty good, kept you waiting huh, even the idea of surpassing metal gear? All according to the will of the patriots... in 1992 nobody was prepared for a memetic weapon of that kind. It caught humanity unprepared. It's hilarious that one of the greatest theses about memes is itself an absolute memetic powerhouse, Kojima is really a William Gibson-level visionary about where things were going to go and also a master of the medium before it even existed. Modern meme but also not an unfair summary of Kojima's work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTqxL_6Ysg )