Try Me

But I won’t tolerate plagiarism

If you dare to test my tolerance level, I will knock you out like that kayaker hit the cyclist on this sign. | Photo credit: Anne Bonfert

There isn’t much that will bring my blood to boil but lying is the main way to achieve that. I was raised with a mindset there is not much worse than lying. And lying covers a lot. Lying can be if you tell me you’re busy and don’t have time to catch up while you lie on the couch and scroll through Facebook. But lying can also be sharing false information or copying my articles and sharing the content as your own.

Plagiarism has never been a bigger problem than it is now.

I’m not sure about you but I grew up in school with only books available as research material and only later the internet became an option. I still remember sitting in the classroom and a friend of mine presenting a subject documenting the sources at the end of her presentation as

Book X
Book Y
Book Z
The Internet

Correct. She simply wrote ‘internet’ as one of her sources. And some students in the room probably still didn’t know what that meant.

Fast forward a few years, I sat in front of piles of books writing my Bacherlor’s and swearing at the fact I wasn’t allowed to write anything myself as I knew nothing (?!) and had to refer to some source for every word I wrote. Using direct and indirect quotation until I couldn’t see quotation marks, books or my keyboard anymore.

And while I thought I’d never end up in the position of needing to cite sources, I suddenly find myself being an online writer finding ways to confirm my statements and I’m back at citing things, now mostly I read and research in the world wide web. Or only there.

And I still have at the back of my mind I can’t have more than three consecutive words taken from a website if not put into quotation marks. Whenever I just copy information over, I need to completely rewrite it in my own words and still quote the source.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering if I’m the only one doing that…

But the world doesn’t stop and while I am told development is important and necessary for a society, some things I wish never got created.

AI content-producing platforms are at the top of the list.

And here I am back at the topic of what brings my blood to boil.

The person who dared to copy one of my articles from title to finish line and publish it under his name.
The person who dared to copy another writer’s name and profile picture to create a fake account and comment in her name spam messages.
The person who dares to use AI to create an article, then insert their own pictures from the last trip to Egypt and then submit it to our publication.
Anyone who uses false behaviors on this platform to achieve an advantage over others while putting less or no effort into it.
…

But listen, as a now several-year-long editor on this platform, first for the World Traveler’s Blog and now for Globetrotters, I can tell and ensure you, the other side of the plate didn’t stand still either.

Just as you become more fraudulent in how you put the content together you submit to us, we also become more alert and experienced in detecting false and computer-generated content.

As it was my editing day today, I skimmed through the first article this morning frowning my eyes as I read the first lines with a dozen words I either didn’t know the meaning of or would never use myself. Now, that doesn’t need to mean anything as I am a non-native writer on this platform and still add new words to my English vocabulary on an almost daily basis but if you are not Erika Burkhalter who writes like they’re from another sphere, I become suspicious.

And while up until recently, I simply would have copied the link into the group chat to hear from the other editors what they think of it, I now took things into my own hands.

One of my fellow editor colleagues used to scan suspicious articles and let us know but I always forgot to save her link. Now doing my own research, I dug deeper into the topic, tested a few different platforms and found out the article I suspected was written 92% by AI.

That was when my blood began to steam. The boiling process reached its limit.

Try me.

But also, just as well as I know I can find on the internet that the grass is not green but blue in its natural color, I know to double check and use different sites to compare.

Digging more into the topic of AI detectors which are also widely used now by teachers and university professors scanning all sorts of student-submitted work, I did stumble upon a few upset youngsters saying the programs detected their words as AI even though they wrote them themself.

Well, then let’s try. I know what I wrote and would be curious what this scanner will show in my article.

And, unsurprisingly, it tells me my last rainbow story which also got boosted was created by a human hand. There you go.

Digging into other websites and researching the best AI detection sites, I open a few different ones, test them out and read the reviews on them. Yes, this all takes time. Time I would usually spend reading your outstanding and incredibly authentic stories, writing my next essay or walking through nature.

But since you brought my blood to boil, I am not going to stop anymore. I even figured out I could create an article on my hiking trip in the mountains using an AI program, then run it through the AI checker and let the program turn the text into a more human-like essay so that editors like me, won’t pick up on it.

Crazy, isn’t it?

It seems you are always a step ahead.

Or maybe not.

I’m scanning the next submissions in the queue of our publication and two more get flagged for having 25% of the content created by AI. This checker also provides an inside in which paragraphs are suspected of AI-created content which helps a lot. Some of them I know are false, but some certainly have been copied from somewhere.

I head back to my own page and copy three more articles of mine to run them through the scanner. All but one come back with a 0% percentage of suspect of AI. The other one has 0,67%. So I scroll through the text and see the highlighted sentence.

“I flew to Ghana in 2014 just after the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.”

Well, at first I think what a stupid program that is but then I think of it. How many times did I write this sentence possibly with those exact words in previous articles of mine? Maybe in ten others? So it does make sense why the program would suspect I copied them from somewhere.

And yes, I started this post thinking I would create a short-form post for the daily cuppa. But once I began to write, I couldn’t stop. I guess that had to do with the boiling blood running through my body.

Also, I wondered if I should publish this post at all because doesn't this just make the said writers alert and let them be more sneaky in their actions?

Well, anyone is free to use AI to create an article. But you have to declare it as such. You have to have a disclosure saying you used AI to produce that piece. Otherwise, it is plagiarism. Period.

Maybe, but this is also a clear statement against the use of AI and hopefully a help for other editors on this platform struggling with the same annoying issues as we do.

So, if you are one of those writers lying into my face when submitting a story under your name while you haven’t touched the keyboard except for the Ctrl, C and V buttons then try me.

And if you are one of the editors trying to detect the above writers, have a better system or maybe a list of rejected writers because of said reasons then please contact me.

Rant over.