AI Plagiarized My Medium Stories Across The Web
AI Cheaters — these websites copy every Medium story I published and all other big publication
On 1 January, I published an article on Towards Data Science(TDS) publication regarding my thoughts on ChatGPT for learning to code. The article picked up audiences, as Google also indexed my article.
Sometimes, I am curious about where the source is coming from; I saw there is a Twitter source.
A few retweets look normal, knowing TDS has 660K followers.
I tried to search for my article title.
I notice something…
Someone copied it- or should I say… an AI copied it…
This is my content…
And this is my content on their website summarized by AI.
You can see this website uses a language model to summarize my content. This is not AI news; this article rephrased my content.
As my content is my personal story, the summarization starts with "The author discusses…."
For news-like articles they copy, the article feels normal to read, for example, this news.
This website ItinAI copies every single article from Towards Data Science
I checked that the first article, "LLMs and Transformers from Scratch: the Decoder" by Luís Roque, was published 2 hours ago on TDS and is already on itinai. Wow…
This AI Copy is Dangerous.
How many copies are available out there?
There are a lot of websites that copy articles from Medium writers.
Remember that this Medium article is copyrighted; we put a paywall on it so only Medium Members can read it. It isn't very pleasant to see someone copy our work and share it online for free for their gain.
I did share friends' links with my friends sometimes, and I am okay with that...
But this is not OK.
I even found an exact copy of my article without any rephrasing!
As a writer, it's sad knowing it happens
But it's a reality that we must face to live in this digital world.
Medium did share what to do if your stories get plagiarized off the platform.
It says that:
If the plagiarism is on Medium itself, please let us know at yourfriends.medium.com
Unfortunately, there isn’t anything Medium can do to prevent people from copy and pasting, and in essence “stealing”, the text from the Medium post page.
The sad truth is it's been happening a lot!
A medium writer, Jennifer Geer, one of the contributors for Illumination Publication, shared her experience when her Medium stories were stolen on NewsBreak.
A medium writer, Simon Whaley, shared a step-by-step guide on what to do when your Medium writing is stolen.
“Frustratingly, Medium cannot do much because they’re not the copyright owner. We retain the copyright in what we publish on Medium. So it’s down to us.” — Simon Whaley
You can try to submit a DMCA Notice to the website owner or complete a DMCA on Google’s platform so their articles will not be indexed on Google.
Conclusion
As a writer, it’s disheartening to see my original work copied without permission, diluting the uniqueness and value of my creative efforts. However, this unintended distribution has brought a silver lining in the increased readership and exposure.
Despite this, the violation of Medium’s rules, especially regarding paywalled content, is a serious issue that undermines the platform’s integrity and the hard work of its contributors.
I am hopeful that Medium will address these breaches effectively. My DMCA submission report is a step towards protecting my rights, and I encourage others to take similar action if they face this issue. It’s crucial to stand up for the rights and recognition writers deserve in the digital age.
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