Very early on in my writing career, I published an article in a business journal called Pacific Basin Reports. If memory serves, it was an analysis of mining interests in Southeast Asia.
A few weeks after the article appeared, I was startled to read the very same article, word for word, under someone else’s byline in the prestigious Far Eastern Economic Review. I’d been plagiarized and it wasn’t at all subtle.
I wrote a letter of complaint to the Review and in response got a brief apology and a small check — the fee for the article.
Plagiarism is no doubt as old as publishing, but it is seldom that blatant. In other cases I became aware of over the years, writers lifted sentences or paragraphs from published articles to enhance their own work. This happened far more often with college students or very young journalists than veterans, and we often caught the offenders and disciplined them.
The Internet brought the potential for plagiarism to a whole new level, but also the tools for detecting it. Fast forward to today and we have the spectacle of AI, in the form of ChatGPT, being used by CNET to generate entire articles.
While this isn’t plagiarism — it could perhaps be called bot-ism — it is a danger nonetheless for honest journalists. One more in a long litany of dangers. Technologies have already helped destroy the economic security of millions of jobs in publishing over the past quarter-century.
Now writers face the prospect of being replaced, as do many other workers, by robots. The fact that they can’t do our jobs anywhere near as well as we can may not be relevant. The evidence is mixed as to how much Americans value great writing in the first place. It is a very tough way to make a living.
Meanwhile, we’ve already gotten used to bots messing up our sentences by “correcting” us by inserting errors.
Which reminds me of a story: A priest, a minister and a rabbit go into a bar. When the bartender comes over, he takes the orders from the first two but hesitates at the third member of the group. "Aren't you a rabbit -- what are you doing here?"
"I'm only here because of auto-correct."
(I first published this essay last year in January.)
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