As I sit down to write you this email, an old pop song, the Smiths’ How Soon is Now, is playing loudly in my head.
That’s because earlier this morning, I read about a new AI project, called Stable Attribution.
The point of Stable Attribution is to try to figure out which human-created images were used to train which AI-generated images.
The motivation, according to the Stable Attribution site, is that artists deserve to “be assigned credit when their works are used, and to be compensated for their work.”
That’s a waste of time, if you ask me, and a focus on totally the wrong thing.
A few days ago, a friend sent me an article about guitarist Johnny Marr.
Marr took a few different songs and sounds — most notably Bo Didley and a rap song called You’ve Gotta Believe – and co-opted them. The result was How Soon is Now, which became the most unique and enduring of Smiths’ songs.
Michael Jackson once ran into Darryl Hall in a recording studio. Jackson admitted that, years earlier, he had swiped the famous bass line for Billie Jean from Hall & Oates’s I Can’t Go For That.
Hall shrugged. He told Jackson that he himself had lifted that bass line from another song, and that it was “something we all do.”
Artists and songwriters co-opt and plagiarize all the time. It’s only in exceptional cases that we find out about it.
But this isn’t a newsletter about drawings or pop songs. It’s a newsletter about business, and marketing, and copywriting.
So let me tell you I once heard A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos on the David Garfinkel podcast.
Parris pointed out how a subhead from one of his million-dollar sales letters was the headline of an earlier control sales letter he didn’t write. That earlier headline worked, and Parris knew that. So he co-opted it, or if you like, plagiarized.
Marketer Dan Kennedy once talked about Bill Phillips, the body builder and fitness coach who built an info product empire.
Dan said Phillips is a pack rat who can pull out fitness ads and promos going back a hundred years. Knowing the history of his industry — and co-opting or plagiarizing it regularly — was a big part of the success Phillips had.
Even the core idea of my email today, of plagiarizing for long-term business success, isn’t new. I got it from James Altucher, who got it from Steven Pressfield. Who knows where Pressfield first heard it.
Fortunately, there is no Stable Attribution for human work. Nor should there be.
So my advice for you is to go back. Study what came before you, and what worked. Integrate it into your own work.
Give attribution if you like, or don’t.
Either way, it’s sure to make you more creative, and more successful at what you do.
And if your work happens to be copywriting, selling, or more broadly persuasive communication, then take a look at my Copy Riddles program.
Copy Riddles will show you the work of some of the most successful copywriters in history, Parris Lampropoulos above among them. But not only that.
Copy Riddles will get you practicing the same, so you can co-opt the skills of these effective communicators and make them your own.
Maybe you’re curious about how that might work. If so, you can read more about Copy Riddles, and buy the program if you like, at the link below: