August 2026

“So when you present an AI system's ideas and words as your own with no critical thought, that is AI plagiarism to me.” — Paul Roetzer, The Artificial Intelligence Show

Paul Roetzer, co-host of The Artificial Intelligence Show, drawing a line on AI and plagiarism at the top of an episode about Anthropic's new watermarking system. His point: the problem isn't using AI to help write, it's using it without any of your own critical thinking.

The Artificial Intelligence Show · 2026-08-18 Listen to the episode → More from Paul Roetzer →

Transcript

The Artificial Intelligence Show Around 00:00 into the episode
Paul Roetzer

So when you present an AI system's ideas and words as your own with no critical thought, that is AI plagiarism to me. It's like that's the problem. It's not that you're using AI to help you. It's that you're not putting any critical thinking into it yourself and the words aren't yours. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Show, the podcast that helps your business grow smarter by making AI approachable and actionable. My name is Paul Raitzer. I'm the founder and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and I'm your host. Each week, I'm joined by my co-host and SmarterX Chief Content Officer, Mike Kaput, as we break down all the AI news that matters and give you insights and perspectives that you can use to advance your company and your career. Join us as we accelerate AI literacy for all. Welcome to episode 232 of the Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm your host, Paul Raitzer, along with my co-host, Mike Kaput. We are recording this at an unusual time, Mike. It is Friday, August 14th at about 2 p.m. Eastern Time. We usually do this on Monday mornings. The week got crazy, and then I have, I'm gone Monday for an event. And then shout out to Kathy McPhillips, our chief marketing officer, who sometimes joins us on AI Answers to co-host, who just delivered my laptop that I somehow forgot at the office today. So it has been like a literally a crazy week. I was in the office this morning. We were working on some stuff, team meetings, and then I shoot home to my home office to do because where the podcast studio is, and I could have pull my laptop out 10 minutes where Mike and I are about to start recording this. I'm like, yeah, we got a problem. So I messaged Mike. I'm like, is my laptop by chance sitting at the office still? So yes, thank you, Kathy, who was heading this direction anyway. Worked out great. She was on her way to a coffee shop. And yeah, she Ubered my computer to me. And so here we are recording. Otherwise, we would have been doing like a Sunday morning thing, Mike. Yeah. Okay. So actually, semi-related to transition into this week is brought to us by MACON, the AI Conference for Marketing and Business Leaders that is happening October 13th to the 15th. The meeting I was in this morning with Mike and Kathy and Ashley and some of the others on our team was talking about Macon. And we decided to do something extra special for our podcast listeners during that meeting. So here we go. So if you have already registered for MACO using the Pod 100 offer, congratulations. You have already received what I'm about to explain. So the way Macon works is Tuesday is a pre-event workshop day. There's five workshops you can elect into when you're registering. And then the main conference is Wednesday and Thursday. And so what we decided to do is on Thursday, which usually by that point, I'm like hiding in the team room, like just trying to decompress momentarily. We are instead going to do a private lunch with me and Mike exclusively for podcast audience listeners. So what's going to happen here is if you register using the Pod 100 code, we have a limited number of seats available for this lunch, but Mike and I are actually just going to hang out in the room and answer whatever questions the attendees have. So if you've already registered with Pod 100 for Macon, which again is October 13th to 15th, you're in. The team will reach out to you with details about it. We have a limited number of remaining seats left in that room. So if you go to Macon.ai, that's the event site, use Pod 100. Not only are you going to get the $100 off the ticket, you're going to get to be a part of that exclusive lunch for podcast listeners. So never been a better time to get in at Macon. Or if you're not a marketer, tell the marketers in your organization about it. We'd love to have them join us. Ticket prices go up August 22nd. So best pricing happens now and a chance to be in the room on that Thursday, October 15th with me and Mike. It is a brand new thing. We've never tried this before and we figure what the hell. Let's see how it goes. So VIP launch, everything, all the lunch is provided. You just show up and network and we'll just hang out and answer questions and talk about whatever you want to talk about. So again, Macon.ai. Mike, am I missing anything? Because like I said, this is about two hours old that we decided we're doing this.

Mike Kaput

No, I think that covers it. It should be, I think we're doing about an hour of lunch. So we'll have a good amount of time to chat through any of people's questions, topics, things they want to chat through.

Paul Roetzer

Yeah. So it should be fun. It's always cool for us to get to meet the podcast listeners. You don't really know who the podcast listeners are until you go. To these events, and someone comes up and introduces themselves. And so, it's always awesome to do it. So, we feel, hey, let's get them all together if we can while we're already there. So, that is happening again, October 13th to the 15th Macon in Cleveland, Ohio, which is our hometown. Opening night party on Tuesday at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The event itself is at the convention center. It's going to be amazing. We would love to see you there. You can go check out the lineup. I think all but three or four speakers have been announced. So, the vast majority of the lineup, speaker lineup, and agenda is there, including Dan Slagan, Mike, who you just did the AI transformation spotlight with, right? On Thursday. Yep. So, August 13th, if you missed it, episode 231 was with Dan Slagan of Zapier, and he told a crazy story about how they're building a second brain at Zapier. I won't divulge everything, but go listen to that. And then, Dan's actually going to be on the main stage at Macon, so you can come and hear him talk as well. Okay, AI Pulse. We always start off with an informal poll each week. We're actually going to let last week's run. We're trying to increase the number of people that are taking this to try and get more projectable data. So, we'd love to actually start moving beyond just the informal poll and get like a formal survey that we can actually use the data for. So, last week's, we asked Mike about AI agents. Is that right? Yeah,

Mike Kaput

how people are using AI agents in their work.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode