A Writer Used AI to Plagiarize Me. Now What? | Hacker News Reader

A Writer Used AI to Plagiarize Me. Now What?

bigtechnology.com

6 pointsgregdoesit6 comments

The plagiarised article in question was on the front page of Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34287747

Interesting enough, it’s author claimed on the HN that they used ChatGPT because they are not a native speaker but maintained that the ideas in the article were original. This article questions this claim.

Was the article actually plagiarized? Yes, the two articles look at the same topic, the economics of the "creator economy". However, they seem to have different points of emphasis. The alleged original [1] focuses on the effects of the hollowing out of the creator economy on firms that provide services for those creators. The key quote that stood out to me was:

    "Trying to siphon off 5% fees from an industry where even the top
    1% are only mere multi-millionaires was never going to work," said
    one top 1% content creator. "How are you going to reach a billion?
    Your addressable market itself is not a billion-dollar industry."

Whereas the other article, the one that is alleged to be the copy [2], is a far more generic-sounding one which expresses pessimism about the prospects of a "creator economy" to address growing economic inequality. The key quote there is:

    The creator economy was once hailed as the solution to economic
    inequality and the savior of the middle class. But as it stands
    today, it is a world where only the top echelon of creators are
    able to make a living, while the rest struggle to find their place
    in a market that is oversaturated and dominated by a few big
    players. It's time to take a hard look at the harsh reality of the
    creator economy and ask ourselves: is this really the future we
    want?

They're not really talking about the same thing, and while the second article is certainly expressing a less original thought than the first, it's not really clear to me that one is plagiarizing the other.

[1]: https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/the-creator-economy-was-way-...

[2]: https://therationalist.substack.com/p/the-creator-economy-th...

This automates what has been the norm in journalism for decades.

Eventually many journalists will be out of a job, since most forms of non-investigative journalism can be done by AI.

What needs figuring out is how to properly reward those who put work into the original story.

> Eventually many journalists will be out of a job, since most forms of non-investigative journalism can be done by AI.

Or maybe we can have more and better investigative journalism. Headline shoveling has never been the most interesting aspect of journalism.

so who pays said investigative journalist's salary while they're investigating something?

It's not like they can produce an investigative piece every day. I would imagine they would take months to get one piece out. And what if the investigation goes nowhere? The journalist either must take on the risk of such a piece - and not get paid if it doesn't sell, or someone must bear the risk of paying before seeing the output.

Neither seems to be a good option.

Paying for journalists is the big problem with journalism in general: how do you fund it? I think a big part of why investigative journalism is struggling is that it's too expensive. Writing some headlines for a story you copied from someone else is much cheaper. Especially when the news organisations are for-profit and any cost cut is more profit for the owners.

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