12 Comments

Outstanding. We’ve discussed so many of these issues, and while plagiarism is of course unacceptable and unprofessional, the misrepresentation of someone’s expertise, sensationalism of the message, and rampant overt financial conflicts of interest are the ones that kill me. The BBC for example actually have very strict regulations on these things, then they invite Tim Spector on repeatedly to promote all his nonsense or allow Mosley to make all his ridiculous shows which promote his books, or consult Alex George about mental health so he can mention his podcast. People don’t even see the problem.

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Couldn’t agree more

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Whether it's intentional plagiarism or chatgpt it highlights a weakness of YouTubers or whatever that 'need' to make frequent content in a niche domain, they're going to run out of things to say pretty quickly and desperation/laziness will kick in for the uncreative creator.

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Agree 100%

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Love this perspective. I've got a bunch of articles on these issues coming as we need to draw a wider attention to it. If people ever find me behaving like you describe, I would hope my friends, colleagues and peers would call me out and hold me to accout. We all need to keep our biases in check.

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Thank you for saying that. I agree. We all make mistakes. A good peer group and kind mentors say things like "yeah, you're in the wrong here, now's the time to step up and put it right". It's happened to me a few times! It's hard to swallow your pride and do that but it makes you a better person in the long run.

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Interesting. Could you explicitly put a link in to the rogue article. If it's as good a plagiarism as you say I doubt (in 2023) it was done by ChatGPT. Firstly, the free version everyone uses is only good for web content up to about 2021 I think. It certainly knows nothing about 2023 articles. However it would be possible to feed in an article piece by piece and have it 'summarise' it. AI will rarely throw things away as it only understands the language not the facts contained therein. You would however be able to feed an entire article into the paid-for version. To do so might require quite mature skills in writing the 'prompt'. I can't find your ex colleagues article (using my phone anyway, as I'd like to do a comparison.

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oh that's really interesting, thanks. I know nothing about this stuff (you don't have to write things yourself anymore!?!?). I really hate to direct traffic to the Daily Fail, but here's the link: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12086147/Dr-Megan-Rossi-reveals-shes-not-fan-new-craze-checking-glucose-levels.html

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This was a very interesting piece to read- thank you! It would be really cool to hear your thoughts on Dustin Moore's piece (https://dustinmoore.substack.com/p/conflicts-of-interest-corporate-partnerships) responding to Anahad O’Connor’s piece: "The food industry pays ‘influencer’ dietitians to shape your eating habits" in The Washington Post. Do you largely agree with him? Thank you for reading this comment!

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Thank you, this is a really important area which I will try to write about!

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Possible dumbness explanation: maybe she just freelanced the piece out to some kid & pushed it out without checking it. You can't expect a busy grifter to do the boring bits.

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Lots of people think this is what might have happened.

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