** RSS Club ** | Rip-Off
Howdy RSS readers! Another long "radio silence" from me. (The situation is even more dire in my personal inbox, which is kinda sad, but I’ve needed to focus my energy off of the computer quite a bit this year.)
Worse yet, all of my projects are Works In Progress, so I don’t have something fun to show you.
This is just something I need to get off my chest.
Pretty blatant plagiarism
An LLM has re-worded one of the pages on my website and someone has posted it as their own.
My original:
It’s my review of a talk titled "TigerStyle! (Or How To Design Safer Systems in Less Time)" by Joran Greef.
Tiger Style! (note the first heading is "Programming the negative space")
"Theirs":
Rip-off: Exploring the Power of Negative Space Programming (archive.org so I don’t drive more traffic to their site).
As I said, much of it is re-worded, but much of the structure and points are the same. Many of the links are the same, but a few new ones have been added.
The most telling clues are the double-double quotes (""…"") around the NASA quote from the Wikipedia article I linked to and the fact that the page is tagged "gptpost". So they’re not exactly hiding it.
Also note that the image at the top of the page is also, of course, a product of "gen-AI", which is why I tell authors that if you write something and slap generated images on it, I’m going to go ahead assume you generated your text too. Fair or not, that’s my assumption and this is why.
I found the page only because I follow Zig programming language news to some degree and this article contains some Zig examples (not in my original), which caused it to come up in a feed I follow. I went from "this sounds right up my alley" to "this seems real familiar" real fast. :-(
I don’t know or care if "Double Trouble" and the "two engineers, Hendrix & Felix" are real people or just a content farm-building script gone wild. I think they very well might be real people, because their full names are on the "Legal Notice" page, which I won’t reproduce here because I’m not interested in "doxing" them, but let’s just say it’s available on the archive.org mirror.)
I don’t know or care if they pointed ChatGPT at my page directly on purpose or if they just asked it to make an article about "Programming the negative space" and my page provided the most "content".
Remember: When you ask one of these tools to write you something, it’s copying other people’s work - and the input sample size may be very, very small indeed.
The end result is largely a reproduction of my write-up that subtly misrepresents several of my points. And what makes this even more silly is that most of my points are my interpretation of a talk I’m reviewing, so now you’re getting them third-hand!
Okay, that’s should be enough to let me forget about this.
I’m not interested in any sort of debate about this. As I mentioned above, my inbox is already in a shameful state.
Thanks for reading. I really, truly appreciate it.