How DeepSeek May Change AI, Copyright and Plagiarism

If you read the headlines, the U.S. tech industry, in particular the U.S. AI industry, is on fire right now.

NVidia, one of the largest tech companies, saw its stock drop 16% yesterday. Though it’s recovered some today, it’s still down 10% over the week. In total, the Nasdaq 100 lost 3% of its value, representing about $1 trillion.

Though the impacts were many, they were all attributed to one single cause: The launch of DeepSeek’s R1 and V3 models.

There are many reasons why DeepSeek is attracting so much attention. Right off the bat, it is the first AI model from China to compare favorably to U.S.-based models like Claude, Llama and ChatGPT. Second, according to estimates, the model only cost $5.6 million to train, a tiny fraction of what it costs to train most AI models.

However, the biggest issue is that the model is open source, meaning anyone can download and use it. Furthermore, since the model costs less to run (estimated between 20 and 50 times less, depending on the task), you can run its largest model on hardware purchased from an electronics store.

This is likely the most significant AI moment since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. So, what will this mean for the copyright and plagiarism issues that generative AI has already raised? The answer is complicated.

The Copyright Question

For all the things that make DeepSeek unique, it shares one thing with its peers: serious copyright questions.

Though we don’t know precisely what content DeepSeek was trained on, it’s pretty clear it was trained on copyright-protected work without permission. Not only can it answer questions about this site, but it will even provide copyright-protected music lyrics if asked (though not always accurate, as my tests showed).

But even as the court cases against the major AI companies finally get moving, this represents a potential tectonic shift in the landscape.

The first problem is that DeepSeek is China’s first major AI company. China has a lengthy history of being a haven for copyright and other IP-infringing markets. Though it has tried to curtail that reputation in recent years, the USTR placed three Chinese marketplaces on its “notorious markets” list just two weeks ago.

However, that may not matter. When you factor in the project’s open-source nature and low cost of operation, it’s likely only a matter of time before clones appear all over the Internet. AI services will no longer be concentrated in the U.S. or anywhere. Virtually anyone can start one.

But, even if they don’t want to host a public service, individuals can run their own. It represents the first time it’s practical for an individual to run a top-tier model on consumer equipment.

From a copyright standpoint, this is similar to the move from Napster to BitTorrent in the early 2000s. It will likely decentralize AI, making copyright issues even more difficult to enforce.

Plagiarism and Authorship Issues

This raises another question: what does DeepSeek mean for the plagiarism and authorship issues?

Right now, probably not much.

If you want to use a generative AI, you are spoiled for choice. You have plenty of options, including free ones, and DeepSeek doesn’t change much there. Though DeepSeek seems to perform better at some tasks, for most end users, it’s, at best, iterative.

Instead, DeepSeek’s impact here might come further down the line. What DeepSeek represents, more than anything is a potential shift in how users interact with AI systems.

Right now, it’s impractical to impossible to run the most complex AI systems on consumer hardware. Even Apple, when adding Apple intelligence to its OS, offloaded many complex tasks to ChatGPT. This has significant impacts on efficiency, privacy and relevancy.

However, by drastically reducing the requirements to train and use an AI model, DeepSeek could significantly impact who uses AI and when they do it.

For example, right now, you can use Grammarly for free if you want basic error correction. However, if you want the most advanced features, which require AI, billing starts at $12 per month. But what if you could get all of Grammarly’s features from an open-source app you run on your computer?

By reducing the overhead needed to run a top-end AI model and releasing it as open-source, DeepSeek has virtually ensured that AI will become more integrated, whatever that entails.

Looking at my previous article about the gradient of AI usage, you will see that more tasks can be done locally. This, in turn, likely means that authorship may lean more toward the AI and less toward the human, pushing more writing further down the scale.

Bottom Line

This is a significant moment for AI. Up until now, generative AI has been expensive and a money-burning proposition. Despite considerable investments in AI systems, the path to profitability was still tenuous.

If DeepSeek lives up to its hype and delivers the improvements it claims, it will be a paradigm shift. High-end AI models can be run in someone’s bedroom rather than requiring a data center.

Legally, the impacts are immediate. DeepSeek represents a form of AI that is much more difficult to stop. Though copyright would never have ended AI, DeepSeek represents a new legal challenge. Not only is it based in China, but it is also an open-source and easily distributed model.

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