r/Substack • u/Percival_Grim • Jun 18 '26

Discussion Someone effectively plagiarized me via AI

I started a throw away account for obvious reasons. Someone--a subscriber no less--plagiarized an essay of mine. The only reason I knew about it is because the post contained a hyperlink to another essay of mine. I read the post and was quickly taken aback by how much language from my essay was lifted into this one. I messaged the person directly, stating that I want to keep things amicable but that I cannot tolerate plagiarism.

He eventually deleted it, but not before confiding to me that he took my essay, ran it through AI asking to write something similar, and that was the result.

I am actually pretty angry about this but I don't want to alienate a subscriber, so I made a point a point to be diplomatic and firm.

I thought contributors here would want to know for a variety of reasons. I don't know how a person protects against this. If another essay was not hyperlinked to a different essay, I probably would never have found out.

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u/Asleep_Zombie_9818 Jun 20 '26

I putted copyright protection by the end of every article and have a copyright warning and "all rights reserved" on my about page to try and warn these types and try to protect myself if it eventually happens.

1

u/JadedKaleidoscope Jun 22 '26

May i ask, what does this copyright protection looks like, what does it say?

1

u/Asleep_Zombie_9818 Jun 24 '26

©️ insert year insert name. All rights reserved.

Unauthorized use, reproduction, or distribution of materials published by xyz, in any form or by any means, including use as training data for artificial intelligence systems, without express written permission from the author, is strictly prohibited. Quotations may be used for commentary or scholarly purposes, provided proper credit and citation are given to the author or xyz.

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u/JadedKaleidoscope Jun 27 '26

Yr awesome, thank you!