A new Substack called The Rationalist recently lifted analysis and writing directly from my Substack, Big Technology. It plagiarized a post on the “Creator Economy” — which we’d covered days prior — and went viral, hitting the front page of Hacker News and sparking a conversation with more than 80 comments. It would’ve been a terrific debut for any publication, if it was authentic.
What made the case of The Rationalist particularly striking, though, was its author — an avatar by the name of “PETRA” — admitted they’d used AI tools to produce the story, including those from OpenAI, Jasper and Hugging Face.