BY SEAN WALSH
For competent plagiarists this could be the best of times
In 1976 a New York court decided that George Harrison had committed “subconscious plagiarism” by passing off My Sweet Lord as his own work. It ruled that the Quiet Beatle’s paean to peace, love and understanding was more than coincidentally similar to the Chiffons’ 1963 hit He’s So Fine.
The decision must have been disappointing to Harrison, reputationally as much as financially. To rip something off shamelessly is one thing but to do it “subconsciously” suggests a lack of due diligence.
My father was good friends with the former Beatle, adored him actually, and once asked George about all this, when they were travelling together from Heathrow to Liverpool Speke Airport. Too bad this was as they were about to land. Harrison’s explanation passed his lips only to merge irretrievably with the ambient cannabis haze. You could smoke on planes back then.
The judge, who was probably a Stones fan, ruled that the two songs are “in essence” the same. They quite clearly are not and are actually of aesthetically different kinds. The Chiffons’ “original” is, to adapt Bowie, a song that will please the ear but leave the mind alone. To just recycle it would be to generate kitsch, not art. My Sweet Lord is much better than kitsch.
Let’s hear no more nonsense, then, about plagiarism being axiomatically a bad thing. Like hypocrisy, it has its uses, and when you copy with finesse, you can produce something original. Thank you, George, and recusant in pace*.
T.S.Eliot remarked that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”; Picasso echoed him when he quipped that “good artists copy, great artists steal”. Or perhaps the painter said his thing first and it was the poet effecting the theft? Either way, there is genius squared in stealing a quote about the virtue of plagiarism and passing it off as your own.
We know what they were getting at. The competent plagiarist is at worst in possession of taste – the ability to discriminate in favour of the beautiful over the ugly. And at best he looks at someone else’s work, marks it as “could do better”, and completes the job himself. The artistically original plagiarist has the talent not so much to recycle as recreate.
In both examples there is an implied rejection of the stupid though widely held belief that in art or literature “all is subjective”, a view which serves as the philistine’s comfort blanket, routinely handed out by enforcers of race-for-the-bottom cultural relativism.
Beauty, or what counts as it, is not decided by human persons, but it can be discerned by them. Real art demands that you pay attention; it grabs you from another dimension.
The dominant culture celebrates dreck. We have a government which is at war with knowledge, is suspicious of history, disapproves of laughter and which has even taken the trouble to remove works of art from government buildings in order to replace them with depressing tributes to the dreadful orthodoxy of political correctness.
All this presided over by a Prime Minister, more android than human, who doesn’t have a favourite book and claims not to dream at night, not even of electric sheep.
We need decent plagiarists in times of cultural collapse, even if it offends the copyright fetishism of Mick Jagger groupies posing as judges in New York courts. The knowledge distributed across the artistic disciplines and handed on in story, poem, painting or song is threatened by the mediocrity zeitgeist.
Plagiarists can be stewards or custodians, navigating artistic space, sifting through the ephemeral rubbish in search of the enduring treasure.
Speaking of androids and copyright, I notice that the media class has finally got wise to the dangers of generative AI, now they sense it’s a threat to the idea that content is always original. It’s finally occurred to them that the conveniences conferred by Chat GPT might have consequences. As with all the devil’s toys, artificial intelligence has its attractions. We must hope that these do not become fatal.
Like an abusive partner, simulated intelligence has gradually weaved itself into every aspect of human life and, astonishingly, there are still people who welcome the intrusion.
The AI evangelists have given up on the idea that robots can be built to think like humans in favour of a Godless vision which urges that we think of humans as bundles of algorithms, accidentally implemented by the hardware of human biology.
But we needn’t reinvent ourselves in ways pleasing to android theology. We can and must continue to do things robots can’t. We can, for example, laugh and mean it, and we can satirize. We can also copy with panache.
Simulated laughter is not genuine laughter, and the plagiarism of the computer algorithm will be a simulation of genuine cheating, one which will never conform to the requirements of taste. The plagiarist has an acquaintance with the norms and caprices of artistic tradition, and an eye for the potential that can be seen in the apparently ugly.
We might think of proposing a new Turing Test, one where the impressive plagiarism of a human being is compared with the faux efforts of the robot wannabe. I suspect the difference would be obvious to anyone with a brain.
The robot would never have been able to do much with He’s So Fine. For those of you rightly despairing at the AI revolution, let me say that the Quiet Beatle did us all a favour, whether “subconsciously” or not.
*I’m writing on what would have been George’s 82nd birthday.
Sean Walsh is a former university teacher in the philosophy of mind. That was a while ago – but he keeps up with the subject. 2015-2017 he was slightly homeless. He now writes and is the very proud father of a wonderful child. He is grateful for everything he has.