Plagiarism 2.0
In my ego searches, I just saw a splog that copied text of mine but ran it through ridiculous almost-synonym replacements. I’m assuming this is done to fool Google into thinking it is original content and perhaps to fool the text cops folks like the AP hire. I won’t link to them on principle but a sample:
This: “Yesterday, I was on a panel with Terry Heaton at the Public Radio News Directors’ annual confab in Washington. Topic: blogging. Terry and I were almost through with opening tap dances when a hotheaded curmudgeon in the third row interrupted — which is fine; we like conversation — to go on the …”
Became this: “Yesterday, I was on a commission with Terry Heaton at the Public Radio News Directors’ period schmooze in Washington. Topic: blogging. Terry and I were nearly finished with inaugural touch dances when a madcap curmudgeon in the ordinal bed broken — which is fine; we same conversation — to go on the …”
I don’t know about you or Jarvis, but I’d much rather be thought of as “madcap” than as “hotheaded” — though neither of these really goes with “curmudgeon,” which strikes me as being closer to the phlegmatic end of the continuum.
Still, this is an object lesson in how difficult it is to produce acceptable automated translations. “Schmooze” for “confab” is good; “period” for “annual,” not so good. And “third” is indeed an ordinal — but you get the idea.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s simply that desperation levels are seriously out of whack: for only a trifle more work than went into setting up this scrape-and-reword system, these weasels could actually be producing their own original content. As Jarvis says, “It’d be funny if it weren’t evil.”
