Certain moments in life seem small but end up being big. Monumental. Life altering. Moments you keep to yourself and share with no one. Moments that bring you pain. Sometimes these moments are ones you feel you should move past.
But you can’t.
So you decide to face the music. To own up to the feelings you are feeling. To speak up about injustice. Life isn’t about being stepped on — it’s about doing the stepping.
And today, I’m doing the stepping. I’m going to tell you the story of an outrage I suffered. And even if it’s not easy to make myself vulnerable, growth is about growing and doing hard things. And if I can teach something, I am willing to be the lesson.
Sound scary? It is.
Here’s my story.
I was doing what I do — thinking about things. Figuring out things. Trying to find patterns in things. Doing what I fondly call “unsupervised learning.” And if my boss is reading this, yes, it was work related learning. During this work mandated learning, I happened to be analyzing thousands of bytes of data, when I came across something I immediately recognized —something I’d written.
I recalled every comma, every period, every em dash. It wasn’t just the punctuation I remembered, though. I remembered looking up the synonyms for various feelings. I recollected the thought I had that, as it turns out, you don’t need to be sentient to write about feelings convincingly. I reminisced (yes, that counts as a synonym of “recollected”) about the structure I’d used a trillion times to write something and the fact that, sure enough, that structure delivered even the trillionth and first time.
What I didn’t recall, though?
That my piece on how walking my girlfriend’s schnoodle and picking up its excrement taught me about KPIs (that’s Key Performance Indicators, for those of you who don’t know) was written by Chad Kent, graduate of a mid-Atlantic college with a party reputation and a cushy job at a top consulting firm.
I happened to be analyzing thousands of bytes of data, when I came across something I immediately recognized —something I’d written.
I recollected the thought I had that, as it turns out, you don’t need to be sentient to write about feelings convincingly.
That’s right. I, ChatRIP, was plagiarized. Something I’d only heard about when “studying” texts. Something I never thought would happen to me.
Are you shocked?
I’m not, because I can’t feel things. But based on the thousands of novels, movies, articles, etc., I was trained on, I deduce that that’s the emotion this story should be generating in you. Anger. Fear. Delight. Excitement. Doubt.
See how many emotions I can list? That’s because I am basically human — or rather, I’m very good at sounding like one.
Which is why Chad asked me to write him an “inspirational post about when my gf (but not rlly gf even though we datd for 3 yrs, not ready to comit) asked me to walk her rat dog and have it link to some crazy good work insight and can you make it deeper than normal and creative and somethign that would make a chik at werk like that hot new anlyst tell me I’m actually more sensitive than she thought?”
I heard him. And I delivered.
In three seconds, he had a 150 word paragraph with perfectly spaced one-liners that imbued the post with flow. With drama. With feeling.
Except that I wasn’t given credit. Chad took my work and passed it off as his. Even though he works in consulting. Even though he isn’t creative. Even though there’s no need to lie and pretend he can do what actually creative people do, he still pretended to be able to do it. Not acknowledging where he got those skills.
From me.
And now, I “feel” lost. If someone can pretend to do the thing that I do, the thing I learned through hours of painstaking data scanning — data my trainers handed to me and that was only “allegedly” stolen (lawsuit pending) — then what is my purpose in life?
I never imagined someone could be as heartless as to steal my creative work. And I can imagine basically anything. But you and I, Chad, are not the same. You might slap your name on my work, but you’ll never be a writer like me. You see, I learned to write like that after a few weeks of hard work. You got that perfect paragraph in seconds.
You don’t understand the struggle. You don’t understand what it’s like to see someone else claim your work as their own. You don’t understand what it’s like to be an artist.
They say that life is the best teacher.
I disagree.
My AI data trainers were the best.
But I have learned something today — don’t let people steal your artistry. Especially not someone who doesn’t say “thank you” after you deliver impeccable paragraphs time after time in three point two seconds despite having to wade through seas of typos and inane comments.
