Plagiarism Thoughts
Dec. 5th, 2023 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jajalalaSo my beloved roomie and I watched the new hbomberguy video about plagiarism the other day... Great video, would recommend, gave us a lot to chew on, both on an intellectual level and (bonus) in a "I love hearing drama" kind of way.
Near the beginning of the video, my roomie and I stopped the video to literally have our own mini discussion group about why we think people plagiarize in the "creative" realm. My personal experience seeing it has usually been in fandom, where I have seen occasional plagiarism, but where it's usually much smaller writers struggling to write, and when I look into it, give a very young impression. To me, I find it bad and all, but in my head it's something children/teens who are still learning and struggling fall back on, and usually comes from a place of desperate admiration of whom they plagiarize.
But most of the video essay was specifically about people with bigger platforms stealing from smaller platforms. Full grown adults copy-pasting obscure forum posts or blog reviews into their scripts to read out to the camera as if they had those thoughts themselves. Hbomberguy talked about the inherent disrespect that comes with it--to steal someone else's idea, believing that they are not even worth crediting, especially when the person they're stealing from doesn't have as large of a platform, so there's an expectation by the plagiarist that they can "get away with it".
It was an interesting shift in how I've often seen plagiarism. In the creative sphere I've seen it as a matter of youth/inexperience. So it's absurd to see an adult who decided "I want to do something creative like make video essays my career" then also go like "but I don't want to write all my video essays, I'd rather basically read through a book and then never mention the book I'm reading from the whole video so it looks like my own thoughts".
My roommate and I were both confused by the motivations. To us, the idea of making a whole video about a subject that you don't actually know or care about seemed absurd. Like why would you outsource the fun part of analyzing and explaining and making those connections? If you can't tell from these long posts, I love overthinking about stuff. And I love writing creatively in general, as does my roommate.
As the video went on though, it became obvious: These people generally aren't invested in the subjects they're speaking about... they went into it for the specific goal of MAKING MONEY. In the Academic sphere, I've seen plagiarism from students who are just looking to pass a required class or something. These fraudulent video essayists are the same as the student who's taking a required class whose only goal is to PASS CLASS, not understand it, and so is happy to cheat/plagiarize because they still achieve their goal end result without ever really learning anything.
These aren't members of a creative community. One of the main guys critiqued was literally a business major. They see video essays as an opportunity to get money, and they see other "creatives" as competitors rather than potential collaborators or community members.
On a much smaller scale, there was a recent controversy in the My Hero Academia fandom over YouTubers who post videos of test-to-speech reading popular fanfics... without permission, of course. The videos are also obscurely titled, for example "What if Deku could see ghosts?" and generally do not have the fic title or author mentioned or credited anywhere in the video or description. And this isn't an "accessibility" thing, like making fics more accessible to people who want/need audiobooks; not a single youtube account description I've seen so far has mentioned that as a goal, and if that were the case they wouldn't go to such efforts to hide the original fics.
I saw various other posts about it - I think at some point I saw a conversation where an author really reamed into one of the YouTubers and I think the Youtuber tried to negotiate something about splitting their $6 of revenue with them to keep a video up?? (the author still asked them to take it down instead). Which made something click in my head as to "why are people doing this?"..... MONEY. Again. It's about being able to release enough videos with a similar schtick that people click and listen bc they don't know any better, and then they get the ad rolls. I don't know the full extent of YouTube monetization, but on a glance some of these accounts have thousands of views on multi-hour videos, and release multiple videos a week. Even if most of these accounts ultimately only make a few dollars overall, the fact is that their motivation is clearly monetary.
It's disheartening to see... Don't get me wrong, I love money and all, but the idea that there are people in the world who would take someone's creative work and copy-paste it into a video with no credit to get a few bucks without getting "caught"... It's like, there clearly is something THERE that speaks to the audience that watches this, but that audience doesn't know who truly wrote the story they're listening to, and the person presenting it to them is actively preventing them from learning. It's a disrespect on such a fundamental level, not just to the individual authors stolen from but also to the concept of creativity itself. Not a source of joy, but a product that you can grab off of someone else and repackage for money.
It just feels so hollow. My roommate and I have talked before about struggling to relate to people who don't have an inherent creative drive. This feels like that times one-hundred. To be not only devoid of creativity but to become a parasite on those who are... ugh.
Hbomberguy ends the video on a good note. He talks about the reality: That there are great, wonderful communities that work together and collaborate and celebrate and CREDIT each other in all sorts of wonderful ways. Some grifters get big, but they're few and far between.
And he emphasized what this reveals about creativity. Clearly there is a demand, people are interested and intrigued by the essays and concepts that were plagiarized. Researching a topic, forming arguments, or writing a compelling narrative is a SKILL... one that becomes such second-nature to some people, that they don't even realize what a skill it is. It becomes so instinctual that they start to feel like "Well anyone could do this."
Well some people can't! Some people are so incapable and lazy that they would have to steal concepts from others to get to their level. So if you're someone who writes, researches, creates, or more.... you should be proud of your passion and your craft. It is indeed a skill that had to be honed, and is worth having pride in.
Near the beginning of the video, my roomie and I stopped the video to literally have our own mini discussion group about why we think people plagiarize in the "creative" realm. My personal experience seeing it has usually been in fandom, where I have seen occasional plagiarism, but where it's usually much smaller writers struggling to write, and when I look into it, give a very young impression. To me, I find it bad and all, but in my head it's something children/teens who are still learning and struggling fall back on, and usually comes from a place of desperate admiration of whom they plagiarize.
But most of the video essay was specifically about people with bigger platforms stealing from smaller platforms. Full grown adults copy-pasting obscure forum posts or blog reviews into their scripts to read out to the camera as if they had those thoughts themselves. Hbomberguy talked about the inherent disrespect that comes with it--to steal someone else's idea, believing that they are not even worth crediting, especially when the person they're stealing from doesn't have as large of a platform, so there's an expectation by the plagiarist that they can "get away with it".
It was an interesting shift in how I've often seen plagiarism. In the creative sphere I've seen it as a matter of youth/inexperience. So it's absurd to see an adult who decided "I want to do something creative like make video essays my career" then also go like "but I don't want to write all my video essays, I'd rather basically read through a book and then never mention the book I'm reading from the whole video so it looks like my own thoughts".
My roommate and I were both confused by the motivations. To us, the idea of making a whole video about a subject that you don't actually know or care about seemed absurd. Like why would you outsource the fun part of analyzing and explaining and making those connections? If you can't tell from these long posts, I love overthinking about stuff. And I love writing creatively in general, as does my roommate.
As the video went on though, it became obvious: These people generally aren't invested in the subjects they're speaking about... they went into it for the specific goal of MAKING MONEY. In the Academic sphere, I've seen plagiarism from students who are just looking to pass a required class or something. These fraudulent video essayists are the same as the student who's taking a required class whose only goal is to PASS CLASS, not understand it, and so is happy to cheat/plagiarize because they still achieve their goal end result without ever really learning anything.
These aren't members of a creative community. One of the main guys critiqued was literally a business major. They see video essays as an opportunity to get money, and they see other "creatives" as competitors rather than potential collaborators or community members.
On a much smaller scale, there was a recent controversy in the My Hero Academia fandom over YouTubers who post videos of test-to-speech reading popular fanfics... without permission, of course. The videos are also obscurely titled, for example "What if Deku could see ghosts?" and generally do not have the fic title or author mentioned or credited anywhere in the video or description. And this isn't an "accessibility" thing, like making fics more accessible to people who want/need audiobooks; not a single youtube account description I've seen so far has mentioned that as a goal, and if that were the case they wouldn't go to such efforts to hide the original fics.
I saw various other posts about it - I think at some point I saw a conversation where an author really reamed into one of the YouTubers and I think the Youtuber tried to negotiate something about splitting their $6 of revenue with them to keep a video up?? (the author still asked them to take it down instead). Which made something click in my head as to "why are people doing this?"..... MONEY. Again. It's about being able to release enough videos with a similar schtick that people click and listen bc they don't know any better, and then they get the ad rolls. I don't know the full extent of YouTube monetization, but on a glance some of these accounts have thousands of views on multi-hour videos, and release multiple videos a week. Even if most of these accounts ultimately only make a few dollars overall, the fact is that their motivation is clearly monetary.
It's disheartening to see... Don't get me wrong, I love money and all, but the idea that there are people in the world who would take someone's creative work and copy-paste it into a video with no credit to get a few bucks without getting "caught"... It's like, there clearly is something THERE that speaks to the audience that watches this, but that audience doesn't know who truly wrote the story they're listening to, and the person presenting it to them is actively preventing them from learning. It's a disrespect on such a fundamental level, not just to the individual authors stolen from but also to the concept of creativity itself. Not a source of joy, but a product that you can grab off of someone else and repackage for money.
It just feels so hollow. My roommate and I have talked before about struggling to relate to people who don't have an inherent creative drive. This feels like that times one-hundred. To be not only devoid of creativity but to become a parasite on those who are... ugh.
Hbomberguy ends the video on a good note. He talks about the reality: That there are great, wonderful communities that work together and collaborate and celebrate and CREDIT each other in all sorts of wonderful ways. Some grifters get big, but they're few and far between.
And he emphasized what this reveals about creativity. Clearly there is a demand, people are interested and intrigued by the essays and concepts that were plagiarized. Researching a topic, forming arguments, or writing a compelling narrative is a SKILL... one that becomes such second-nature to some people, that they don't even realize what a skill it is. It becomes so instinctual that they start to feel like "Well anyone could do this."
Well some people can't! Some people are so incapable and lazy that they would have to steal concepts from others to get to their level. So if you're someone who writes, researches, creates, or more.... you should be proud of your passion and your craft. It is indeed a skill that had to be honed, and is worth having pride in.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-06 11:03 am (UTC)Money is such a strong motivating factor for these things, really there have been so many past waves of YouTube videos that copy other people's contents for views like reaction content but the appearance of expertise that comes with a video essay makes it feel so much worse. In those cases, the acts of plagiarism also tend to combine with misinformation as the lack of research and due diligence means they don't actually know what they are talking about at all. Todd in the shadows did another video on Somerton showing the extent of the misinformation he was spreading outside of the plagiarism itself and it's damning. To be real though - this is the end state of capitalism. It doesn't matter whatever inherent quality the work has, if it can get money, it will succeed no matter the human cost.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-06 01:13 pm (UTC)Ahahah I'm aware of the Todd in the Shadows video--I used to watch him almost a decade ago for music review stuff?? So I was shook to learn that (1) he's still going, and (2) he's gone OUTSIDE of his usual music purview specifically to address the misinformation this guy was spreading!! So my roommate and I have that video on our to-watch list, but we're both busy so it's gonna be a bit XD.
Alas, it all comes down to capitalism.... the system is set up to motivate this kind of behavior :'(. I hope that hbomberguy doing this at least gives anyone else plagiarizing a big scare that might encourage them to change their ways, and/or at least teaches a new wave of video essayists some important values that they can carry as they enter the YouTube community. Also it DEFINITELY is making me want to be a more critical viewer... I feel particularly aware now of content farming and wanting to disengage any channel that seems to be producing way too much at an unreasonable rate.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-06 11:19 am (UTC)i did think it was very interesting to see his perspective as a video essayist since there is the added allure of clout that was never in the equation for my line of work. that and money haha. but overall, the topic of disrespect either of the medium, the people plagiarists steal from, and/or their audience is definitely something distressing to think about. it's sad to me just the volume of work that was stolen without any of these people ever being credited. im honestly more curious about why people lie when it's so obvious that they've stolen something. is it somerton's ego? is he a pathological liar at his core? is it the fear of losing his income and having to work *gasp* a normie job? i'll be so curious to see his actual response to this, if he ever shares one publicly.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-06 01:41 pm (UTC)Thanks for bringing the English teacher perspective. It's fascinating to see the behavior of students reflected in these grown adults... like in school, theoretically all that plagiarism most likely never leaves the teacher's gradebook. Like that student isn't spreading misinformation to other students or going online with their essay for clout. It has to be addressed to teach students that this (1) doesn't actually show their knowledge of the material and (2) plagiarism is NOT something we want to rely on, esp as we go forward into the "real world"... but it isn't directly affecting the people around them or their communities.
The lying aspect is truly scary. In my heart I want to believe in the best in people, and the first time someone is caught plagiarizing I would want to believe that it IS possible to not fully understand the lines and community expectations when starting out. I imagine a certain disconnect from others on the internet--it's easy when reading text on a screen to sort of imagine that text just "spawned" somewhere without imagining a human being behind it. So taking from it is just like plucking from the garden that is the internet. I think that's a bad perspective, but I can high-key see how someone starting out might not process it that way.
And yet... so many of the plagiarists shown were caught multiple times. At that point it's not misunderstanding or inexperience, it's so clearly DELIBERATE... and it takes those active lies in order to keep up and fight the allegations (like the number of times Somerton altered his own stories, wow). These people truly believe they can get away with it... and it seems in many cases they can. Especially since YouTubers are "personalities" and audience members often get parasocial, they're inclined to believe them and not seek out the facts. It's only in the rare case where someone with wider "clout" discovers and decides to unveil it that this sort of thing gets properly addressed on a community level.
Because I'm nosy I did search for a response from Somerton and found some records on reddit. Apparently he posted on his patreon twice. The first message was before he watched the video--saying something like "Nick and I are under attack from a YouTuber much larger than us. He's going over allegations I've already addressed, nothing new" (these are my recollections, not real quotes). Then he deleted that and posted a new message that was pretty much a "Sorry. I need to take some time to compose myself and a response." and then deleted his patreon. If he's responded since then, I haven't seen it, but I would be curious to see too.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-06 09:04 pm (UTC)I've found that anytime a creative hobby gets mentioned in a general group setting -- like a mate and MG talking about some music they were working on together -- someone will always suggests monetizing it!
I have a mate who is a professional violinist and a hobby brilliant knitter (really brilliant, she even makes one of a kind wall hangings) and she gets it all the time 'you SHOULD sell your work' not even could... although she does sometimes get 'your work is so good you could sell it!'
no subject
Date: 2023-12-07 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-07 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-08 09:38 pm (UTC)People not monetizing their hobbies makes sense to me (I'm very much the same--my day job has just about NOTHING to do with my creative endeavors and I like it that way. If I made art with the thought "will this sell?" the kind of art I would create would be different than that made without the intention of "selling"). What makes less sense instinctively to me is WHY a non-creative person would go into a creative venture and do all this sort of stressful plagiarism work to present themselves as a creative... I kind of feel like "Just don't do a job where you have to steal other's work to get anywhere!! There's other non-creative jobs in the world I'm sure you could thrive in!!"
I guess they're probably thinking with the same mindset as the people telling your creative mates "you could sell it!"... art as a product more than anything else, and they believe they found a life hack to monetize other people's "product".
no subject
Date: 2023-12-08 09:49 pm (UTC)I mean, even if it's not directly plagiarism, an extremely successful youtuber will result in a million channels of the same ilk.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-07 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-08 09:42 pm (UTC)Poor fanartists! I hate to say it, but I've passed by a lot of obviously reposted art on tiktok that doesn't even have the source anywhere... it makes me sad bc I assume whoever reposted loved the art enough to want to share it, but there's no respect for the person who created the art and how they might feel.