A new Substack called The Rationalist recently lifted analysis and writing directly from my Substack, Big Technology. It plagiarized a post on the “Creator Economy” — which we’d covered days prior — and went viral, hitting the front page of Hacker News and sparking a conversation with more than 80 comments. It would’ve been a terrific debut for any publication, if it was authentic.
What made the case of The Rationalist particularly striking, though, was its author — an avatar by the name of “PETRA” — admitted they’d used AI tools to produce the story, including those from OpenAI, Jasper and Hugging Face. The speed at which they were able to copy, remix, publish and distribute their inauthentic story was impressive.