The Copy Game

What happens to plagiarism in the age of AI? What happens to concepts of "authorship," "copying" or "property" when new technologies feed off large data sets of human output and generate texts almost indistinguishable from human authors? This brief excursus considers these questions by reading Eduardo Coutinho's film Jogo de Escena in dialogue with Alan Turing's "imitation game," and by shifting the emphasis from the capacity to imitate to the moment of enunciation. Coutinho's experimental film doesn't only play a game between the original utterances of women in Rio and the actresses that reenact them but also shows every utterance to be filled with dialogic overtones, a link in the chain of speech communion. If plagiarism depends on cutting loose from the citational chain, an erasure of debt and a claim to originality, the utterances produced by large language technologies are plagiarism on a massive scale.