I am an avid watcher of videos on YouTube from writers and readers–the corner of the internet known as BookTube. And I just watched the craziest video:

It’s 35 minutes long, so you don’t have to watch the whole thing, but just click on it to hear the premise. And if you don’t want to do that, here’s the gist: a woman who is an author comes up with a romance book idea with her husband. Another woman sees the video, shows it to her boyfriend, and the boyfriend feeds the idea into ChatGPT to generate a full book from it, then emails it to the original author. WTF!

I am not blaming the original author in any way for sharing her idea publicly. But I’m terrified of my ideas being stolen because ideas don’t come to me easily. So if I have an idea, I tend to dance around it or say something like, “It’s inspired by X,” and that’s the most I’ll share…unless the idea is written as a book that is under contract and going to be published. Then I feel safe to disclose.

I know that ideas can’t be copyrighted. The rendition of the idea is what’s protected. But, there’s still this moral quandary when it comes to using someone else’s ideas anyway. It doesn’t constitute full plagiarism, but people (like readers) will still call out theft when they see it. And with the video above, I can definitely agree that the man stole the author’s idea.

Writers share their ideas online all the time. I think a large part of it is because we’re expected to market ourselves whenever we aren’t writing, so if we come up with a cool idea that we will soon work on, we want to share it to entice our readers to stick with us. We want to build buzz from the get go. And the author in the video had a ton of buzz, with lots of people telling her it should be a book. She had a successful social media interaction when it came to promoting her writing. But then…someone stole her idea and “made” their own book from it. Ew.

Whenever I have a good idea (which is rare) I want to shout it from the rooftops to people. I want them to be excited for me. I want them to want to read it once it’s written. And I want validation that the idea is good. But…with crazy people out their thieving ideas in weird ways, I’m keeping mum.