Diana Meresc May Have Finally Been Banned from Medium

The day many people have been waiting for may have arrived.

It appears that Diana Meresc may have been banned from Medium.

I entered her Medium profile URL last night and saw the dreaded ERROR 410 screen of doom (see image above). It was a sight for sore, AI-fatigued eyes.

What Happened

For those who aren’t familiar with Diana, “she” is an individual that many Medium writers suspect has been using AI to create articles. Many suspect she’s also using bots to follow Medium writers and clap, highlight, and comment on, their stories.

She has the dubious distinction of possibly being one of the most prolific undercover AI content creators and bot abusers on Medium.

I was elated when I first noticed that Diana was consistently highlighting my stories and giving me the well-respected 50 claps every time. Then I reciprocated by going to her stories and reading, highlighting, clapping, and occasionally commenting on them.

The more I read her stories, the more something seemed off. They were coherent. They were informative, but all of them were lifeless listicles.

Just a lot of content laid out in a vapid manner. There were no personal stories. No stories of how she faced a challenge and then used the steps in her articles to overcome the challenge.

Zero humanity or emotional impact.

There are some excellent Medium writers who don’t include personal stories in their articles, but when you add all the suspicious things Diana did together, it doesn’t compute.

She left the exact same comments on stories written by different writers. Whenever I asked her a specific question, she never addressed it.

Then I saw that others noticed the same thing. Gustave Deresse exposed her AI antics and also showed an old profile photo she used, which was actually a cover photo from Pixabay.

Kristina Segarra, William Vincent Carleton, Bonnie J. Sludikoff, Avanthi Nadesan, and quite a few other Medium folks have also addressed her underhanded AI tactics.

How it Happened

How did this bullshit go on for so long?

Diana was able to engage in this deception for a long time because she used some of the best parts of our humanity against us: the need to be seen and heard and the need for connection and community. She used bots to make us feel seen and heard when she highlighted, clapped, and commented on our stories.

The problem is that machines don’t see and hear us.

One of the best, if not the best part of Medium, is the vibrant community of readers and writers that interact with and support each other. One of the most egregious things she did was infiltrate the flesh and blood Medium community and pretend to be one of us.

Many of us believed she was one of us, when in reality we were usually interacting with a mindless machine.

After she was exposed, I believe she most likely made some “real” comments in articles, but this was likely an adaptation mechanism she used because people had caught on to her shenanigans.

Another egregious thing she did was create an endless stream of lifeless articles with software applications, while thousands of us worked our asses off to create quality articles. A LOT of us spent many hours researching, writing, and rewriting our articles, many of which didn’t get a fraction of the reads, comments, and claps her articles got.

How much time did people waste reading articles they thought were written by a human?

Duping so many good-hearted Medium members for a long period of time is a despicable act.

Humans vs Machines

I’m glad the Medium writers I mentioned earlier brought this to our attention — at least those of us who were fortunate enough to read their articles about this deception.

Medium has said they’re cracking down on people who write AI articles without disclosing they’re generated with AI. I did notice that another bad actor who was abusing AI got his account suspended, pending a Medium investigation. Thanks for taking action, Medium.

I hope Medium bans the Diana Meresc account for good.

The Terminator movie series is about humans who are fighting against AI-powered machines that are trying to enslave or kill the human race. This network of murderous machines is called Skynet. Its sophisticated machines adapt, reason, and become more efficient over time.

At the end of the Terminator movie Terminator Salvation, the human resistance destroyed a huge Skynet facility, which contained a big stockpile of weapons and many upgraded, human-killing terminator robots.

The humans have won a hard-fought battle. One of the main characters says, “There is a storm on the horizon — a time of hardship and pain. This battle has been won, but the war against the machines rages on.”

If the Diana Meresc account is banned, it will be a small victory, but the war against machines on Medium and other sites will rage on.