cant write your own words so steal others
cheating with article generator programs
scamming on mylot
Cheating with Article Generator Programs
By JC1969
@JC1969 (1224)
United States
March 19, 2007 9:40am CST
I was wandering around today on Mylot and discovered a member who was posting a new discussion like every minute. Now to me, that is usually a warning sign that member may be stealing text from another site and pasting it into here. What I discovered is this member and their 4-5 friends seem to start a discussion with what looks like copy and pasted text, then the friend will respond with some more of the articles text, the next friend with some more, and the next friend with even more. Now, when you google the text, you cannot find it. Then it occurred to me, they could be using an article generator. This is an application that takes text you put in from another source and sort of re-writes or scrambles it so it can pass a google or copyscape check. In the freelance writing industry it is frowned upon to use such applications as it muddies the content article industry and makes for poor quality reading at best.
So, my question to you all is do you consider the use of this type of program as cheating and scamming on Mylot?
1 person likes this
2 responses
@blueskies (1186)
• United States
19 Mar 07
Absolutely it's cheating. If you come across a group of people doing this, be sure to report each of them and supply mylot with as many details as possible. It's the only way to keep this site fair for all of us.
@JC1969 (1224)
• United States
19 Mar 07
I do indeed report them, however, I am not entirely sure Mylot will see anything wrong with what they have done, because technically there is no proof that they are using an article generator.
I actually had a writing gig offered to me from a person who was from India that clearly stated I should use an article generator program to steal articles from other websites and generate refurbished or rejuvenated articles from with the program. I told them that I am a professional and would not compromise my ethics.
The real problem is that these new articles are filled with grammar errors, scrambled rephrasing, and they often do not make any real sense. The program doesn't rewrite, but it takes a few words in each sentence and flip-flops, rearranges, or adds other words to it. Then this supposed new and improved articles is pushed out onto a website in the hopes of making money.
@JC1969 (1224)
• United States
23 Mar 07
I did report that member and the friends that I saw and suspected they were doing this. This member was posting these obviously plagiarized but newly scrambled article portions for every discussion. Then the 5 friends on the members list would post more segments of the article till the article was complete. I wasn't sure if mylot would see it my way, because like I said you cannot trace these articles back to the original source because they've been slightly scrambled to look like new articles and therefore become untraceable in copyscape and by googling. I've ran into clients that asked me to use their article generator software to do this to bulk amounts of articles they steal online and I refuse to do that kind of work and find it unethical.
