Microsoft just gave us the perfect name for AI thieves: Kyle
I have been thinking a lot about this 30 second advertisement release by Microsoft, because more than anything I’ve seen it summarises what generative AI is actually for.
First, please go watch the full thirty seconds if you haven’t already:
This ad is produced by Partizan (their terms and conditions prevent AI copying of their work, by the way) and Division Film. As I said on Bluesky, it’s an amazing piece of work. I hope it gets archived somewhere forever.
It’s an open admission from Microsoft about the purpose generative AI is designed to serve. A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks Copilot to literally copy it, and then he gets all the praise instead. There have been so many ads for generative AI that have been confused, misleading and vague. This one just tells a specific product truth like no other piece of advertising ever has before.
Let’s do a shot-by-shot breakdown of this absolutely phenomenal piece of cinema (which, by the way, was shot on film).
Shot-by-shot breakdown
00:00 -> 00:05
“If you ask Kyle, he wouldn’t say he’s competitive……………out loud”
A little bit of scene setting. Kyle’s an unassuming office worker, in a boring office. He’s got a warm smile, and gives a friendly nod. “Hey!”
The narrator, milliseconds into the clip, reveals Kyle’s frazzled mental state in two words: “…….out loud”. Millimetres below the surface of his regrettable facial hair, a roiling ocean of suppressed rage.
00:05 -> 00:11
“But at 9.42am, Daniel’s forecast model was called……’Honestly, Beautiful'”
The narrator drops a precise timestamp, like he’s recounting the exact moment of a terrorist bombing inside Kyle’s soul. We see Kyle’s colleague praising Daniel’s forecast model in the chat, and there’s a shot of colleagues crowding around Daniel’s desk, clearly awed by his forecast model.
And we see the coworker’s words reflected in Kyle’s eyeball – a popular horror movie trope. Do not doubt that the first moments of this ad are a horror movie. This is Kyle’s nightmare: a Black colleague receiving praise for good work; surrounded by adoring colleagues. Unjust and unfair; Kyle deserves the applause. Kyle could never explain why, but he knows that he was born with the right to be the main character, and Daniel’s accolades are an unacceptable and unnatural transgression.
The racial politics of this ad are fucking incredible. And my god, the number of people in real life I’ve worked with who have this exact horror movie playing out in their heads whenever they saw some foreign pretender like me enjoying success. Let’s just say this ad is clearly based on a many true stories. Absolutely the same applies to gender politics too, going by the replies I had when I shared this video.
Not just a horror movie trope by the way, but the opening shot of Blade Runner; a film in which human-created biological beings show more verve, more life and more vividness in their eyes than their dull creators. Kyle’s pain calls back to the vivid, glowing inner life of the Replicant, and the jealous, sweaty inadequacy of human beings.
00:11 -> 00:16
“And honestly, that got to Kyle”
This is a brief sequence but it’s the most important in the whole ad, because it really depicts what ‘got to’ means. A rapid sequence of shots, each lasting only a few frames, shows
- Daniel being clapped at by his colleagues (‘great model’ etc)
- Kyle grinning but showing stress and frustration
- Kyle’s huge, sweaty smile in close-up
- Kyle LITERALLY CRYING for about 4 frames
- Kyle slumped backwards in his chair, staring blankly at the ceiling like an actual serial killer
Kyle’s pinballing mental state, careening between joy, tear-sodden sorrow and blank-faced neutrality, has a cure at the end of this sequence – the Copilot button in Microsoft Excel.
00:17 -> 00:21
“But no worries, he just turned to Copilot”
Kyle’s real smile comes roaring back, when he types (as implied by the text overlay) into Copilot:
“Analyse Daniel’s model in the all hands channel”
“Improve my charts”
“Make mine beautiful”
The last of these is overlaid on top a of a tight close-up of Kyle’s grinning lips, whispering the words out loud:
My charts. Make mine beautiful. It was Daniel’s model, but it is now Kyle’s, turned into something “beautiful” with a whispered command. This, my friends, is the fundamental core purpose of generative AI. It is the tool of the mediocre, jealous colleague, who uses your work as input into the machine, to spit out a garbled version and slap their name over it. It is aggressive, non-consensual assertion of ownership over someone else’s work.
It is not just stealing someone’s handbag: it is walking away very slowly after you’ve stolen it, yelling “hey, I MADE a HANDBAG”.
And the Kyles that steal like this do not recognise it as anyone else’s work: they genuinely, sincerely believe it is theirs. I see this all the time on social media, most of all LinkedIn, where someone announces they’re sharing the outputs of generative AI, and describes as “Hey everyone, I made this….”. Claude, Copiliot and ChatGPT are programs tuned to twang the strings of male ego like no other piece of software in human history; puffing up users with dripping compliments. Of course they feel like they did it themselves.
00:22 -> 00:25
“You see, Kyle’s not competitive. It’s not even a contest”
Out comes the dashboard (looking exactly the same as every other corporate dashboard has ever looked, by the way. It’s not beautiful!). Daniel is looking at Kyle like this is the twentieth time that this has happened this month:
kyle you piece of shit
And that line, holy shit. “It’s not even a contest”. Of course it isn’t. Again, this is the core function of generative AI.
Daniel’s role in the right way of things should be that he is the feedstock for the machine that spits out Kyle’s ‘work’. Daniel is an input, not competition or a colleague or even really human. If it were a contest, Kyle would lose. The only way for Kyle to win is if there’s no fight at all. Daniel always loses, Kyle always wins.
00:26 – 00:30
In the final shot, a swarm of colleagues fawns over Kyle. They chatter excitedly above and around his head, but he barely hears a word, he’s so lost in his own success. A woman rubs his clothes with a lint roller; an obscenely gendered show of submission and reverence. Another colleague simply sits at the bottom-right corner of his desk, head propped up with his arm, gazing lovingly and unbreakingly at Kyle.
Kyle leans back and for the first time, displays a genuine smile. Nothing is simmering below the surface. Kyle is at peace. The world is fixed.
This is what GenAI was always meant to do
I saw a few responses that theorised the agency was doing ‘malicious compliance’ here; intentionally making an embarrassingly honest ad. I don’t think that’s true – I think this was meant to be a short skit with humorous overstatement that still showcases a sincerely-held application of the product being advertised. There are jokes, but they still meant it. It would’ve also passed through a shocking number of layers of review before being aired around the world (many people who responded said they saw it in the UK, for instance).
As I have detailed on Bluesky, something really notable is how AI plagiarism is not just our life’s work being fed into models to use as training data. Despite the many megatonnes of fossil fuels poured into the maw of chip-meltingly hot data centres, the raw outputs of modern models are still just…….fundamentally fairly shitty. Kyle has to beg Copilot to make his thievery look ‘beautiful’.
It makes way more sense for content thieves to feed new work directly into a model, and request a perturbed version that’s different enough to evade copyright laws or easy detection. Most recently, comedians (usually young women) have been having their work stolen by people using generative AI to create semi-pornified versions of the stand-up sets.
In one recent case of thievery, Fred Lambert of the rapidly slopifying cleantech site ‘Electrek’ simply fed one entire blogpost written by me into an LLM, and produced essentially the same post but with zero writing quality, data visualisation skills or connection to real, material issues. Ironically, of course, it was a post critical of Elon Musk’s AI data centres. Electrek probably earned a decent amount of revenue from my work by running ads in their article. The spectre of a mediocre white guy using AI to steal my work to pretend to be against AI is just…..a lot.
https://bsky.app/profile/ketanjoshi.co/post/3mg6jy2e6kc2u
There is essentially nothing I can do about this sort of thing, besides suggest anyone who hasn’t already completely blocked Electrek to make sure they do so. It’s the same story no matter where you look: there is absolutely zero recourse for the victims of generative AI assisted theft. Social media platforms could easily choose to aggressively crack down on it, and bosses in corporations could choose to treat it as a punishable offence. But in both instances, they very much benefit from the newfound permission space for theft created by AI hype, so the chances either will take action is close to zero.
He is a Kyle; he just did a Kyle; I think this content is Kyle
With all of this in mind, I am inventing a new word. Kyle.
Kyle can be a proper noun; a taunt. There’s a good chance every real-life Kyle looks pretty much the same as Microsoft’s fictional Kyle.
Kyle can be a verb, too. Oh my god, I think he Kyle’d my report. And finally, we can use Kyle to describe the finished ‘product’. Man, this video looks really Kyle.
Kyle is the entire lifecycle of AI-assisted theft enacted by mediocre white guys who’ve always stolen the work of young people, people of colour and women their whole lives, but who now have access to a machine that does it breezily and effectively. Kyle is the person, the act and the output. Kyle is the feeling: the deep, unchecked joy he feels when he’s cheated his way into success rather than earning it. Kyle is the wind in his hair he gets to feel because he’s standing high on a bunch of other bodies.
If they’re saying it out loud now, why don’t we say it back to them, and reintroduce some the normal moral punishments we use to dole out for thieves and free-riders? Your boss isn’t going to do it. The social media platform isn’t going to do it. So maybe we’ve just go to do it ourselves. Watch out Kyle, Daniel’s pissed off.
