How I Got Scraped
It doesn't matter whether it was by an AI
Last Friday, July 4, I published a piece on Substack introducing a series of essays on varieties of dualism: soul-body, mind-body, brain-body, etc. Here’s a link to the piece. I hope to publish an essay on each type about every two weeks. As I almost always do, I promoted the essay on Reddit, in this case on r/consciousness. You can see the thread here. A lively discussion ensued, which I took little part in, since the commenters didn’t address most of their points to me but instead to each other. I didn’t receive a lot of upvotes, but I did receive a fair number of shares and views, so I count it as a minor success.
Last night, Wednesday, July 9, I was doing research on the web looking for people who write, on Reddit, Quora, blogs, etc. about their belief that they are essentially a mind that possesses a body. Interestingly, I didn’t find anybody but a few academics and theologians who explicitly held that belief. Cartesian anthropology seems to have almost no following among the general public, although I strongly suspect that many people do implicitly believe themselves to essentially be their intellects. We’ll get back to this in a later essay.
While doing the research, I ran across a website with the awkward name “Mystery Lores.” They specialize in conspiracy theories, esoteric spirituality, mythology and folklore and other spooky topics. Their page seems to consist of short articles in their fields of interest.
Normally something like this would hold no interest for me, but the article at the top of the page sounded familiar. It was titled “Exploring Dualism: A Fresh Perspective on Mind-Body Connections | Voices Emerge” Upon closer inspection I realized that it was a summary of the Reddit discussion I had instigated! But it didn’t mention my name or even Reddit. It only mentioned a recent discussion “across forums.”
The wording of the summary was too close to mine to be coincidental. It mentioned my trifecta of “soul-body, mind-body, and brain-body dualism.” It’s rare to see anybody put all three of those together. But what cinched the matter is that it exactly quoted two comments with distinctive wording. Yes, this was based on my thread.
Now, I don’t own the material on Reddit. It’s technically not intellectual property theft to “adapt” it. But it’s still dishonest. The article on Mystery Lores should have mentioned my name and included the link I used in the original post that started the discussion. This isn’t some notion that’s gotten loose in the cultural atmosphere and is being bandied about. I originated the idea of doing a grand taxonomy, and I am going to do all the work on it (while crediting other thinkers whose work I draw on of course). Neither was what was done fair to the Reddit commenters.
An author and editor of the piece are mentioned by name. I’m not going to repeat those names here. I’m not sure they’re even real. The website offered no way to comment on its stories or contact its staff, so I can’t ask for a retraction or at least credit where credit is due.
In addition to being dishonest, the piece is badly written and organized. I ran it through ChatGPT and asked whether it was written by an AI, and it said almost certainly not, since it had too many “personal” and “informal” touches. I read most of the piece to a college English instructor of my acquaintance, who unfortunately has to deal with a lot of AI-written essays, and she said that it almost certainly was written by one. I can’t decide, and in the end it doesn’t matter. The piece could have been written by an AI under the supervision of a human who looked for interesting topics on the web.
This is a startling experience, although not entirely new. I know, because I’ve asked it, that ChatGPT is trained on my book Killing Cool. Based on that, I’ve been able to use Chat to brainstorm, although I do not let it do any of my writing for me, except for taglines for posts (in effect, ad copy, which I’m not terribly good at).
However, this is different. This happened in real time, I saw the results, and I was knowingly erased. My ideas, according to this article, are simply carried by the wind. It makes me angry, even while it makes me laugh, because it’s so ridiculous.
Yet it’s also a little bit encouraging. I can, if I choose, take it as a sign that my ideas are loose in the culture. If my thinking gains widespread currency, as I hope it will, probably people will frequently mention it without mentioning my name.
But it’s too early for that. Right now, I’m being treated, whether by AI or a hack writer, as disposable material to reuse, just like all those artists whose works are being used to generate images, only it’s really obvious this time, since some of the wording is identical. I’ve just been scraped to generate ad revenue, and probably with the help of another human author. Shame on him.