Money for Slop: How Greed Turns Writers into Thieves

The Maalvika Bhat scandal and AI-generated Bestsellers

Image licensed from iStock

“It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.”

So said Mark Twain. And this week, an up-and-coming 25-year-old Gen Z influencer supposedly doing a “Dual PhD” at Northwestern University has become internet news for doing precisely that. Maalvika Bhat, who has 180,000 followers on TikTok and 63,000 on Instagram, has stolen the words of others, represented them as her own, and rocketed to the top of the engagement charts on Substack, the platform where I have hosted my writing for the last 19 months.

The alarm bells, first sounded by

Katie Jgln

a year ago, have been echoed by others who found their words “repurposed” by Maalvika: the receipts for the main theft lie in Katie’s Mama, There’s a Plagiarist Behind You.

As someone not generally writing about mass-interest subjects like tech culture, and 100% likely to segue into personal details like my stepfather’s penis, I’m not the most at risk here. But in the last 30 days of a searing July, I’ve slid away from a bestseller badge like melting ice cream.

You get your badge at 101 paid subs. I was so. Effing. Close.

Whereas the proven plagiarist Maalvika rocketed to 32,000 subscribers with 11,000 likes on a viral piece about “compression culture”, which, when she wisely put it behind a paywall, took her to the Number 1 “New Bestseller” slot on Substack earlier this week, and now Number 2 Rising in Tech. So there is a sense that money is sliding out of the hands of original creators and into bank accounts of those able to game the system and please the masses.

It was ever thus.

For a slim year, Substack looked like becoming a viable way to support myself as I weather the uncertainties of a risk-averse publishing industry. But now? I have morals, so I’m probably doomed. Influencers prepared to do anything (including stealing other people’s work) to get traction and make money have moved into the place I was hoping might sustain me.

Let’s look at Maalvika Bhat. She’s not a bot, as some have suggested; and, no, not just because she appears in person on her Tiktok and Instagram Reels: these can be AI-generated too now (watch this brilliant video by Travis Bible: effing scary, and not just for your grandad.)

thetravisbible

A post shared by @thetravisbible

Here’s the evidence she’s real: she’s currently listed on Northwestern University’s “Labs on Innovation, Networks and Knowledge” People page.

And this is fascinating, surely: her speciality is “Technology and Social Behavior”. She is “examining how big data and algorithms are creating and exacerbating disparities in infrastructure, systems, and social networks, to eventually help in reducing them.” What, eventually, after she has helped to exacerbate those disparities by dominating those algorithms she very clearly understands all too well?

Is she, in fact, her own research project?

Even more fascinating, her two most recent (and only sole-authored) papers currently listed on Google Scholar are on AI, with one of them about shaping “User Perception and Emotional Connection to Text-Based AI” and the other relating to “Transparent Decision-Making and Ethical Reflection” Ethical reflection! I’ve gone past hollow laughter into serious guffaws.

Is her viral piece, rather than being plagiarised, AI? Not as far as we know (though AI would be a great way to hide Copy-Paste). I ran a couple of accessible paragraphs (all I had) through AI detectors and got diddly squat. But then, she is working at the cutting edge of AI: maybe she has access to algorithms that aren’t detectable by Grammarly or ZeroGPT. Perhaps she’s even written them.

When this scandal first blew up, I was extremely cross with Maalvika Bhat.

(Isn’t it great that her first syllable is so close to the Latin prefix for “bad” or “evil” and her surname is a monetary unit?)

Now, as it more and more looks like she might be tasting some consequences, I am feeling more compassionate towards her. It’s okay if you don’t join me. But the online mobs are horrible (they came for me, once, when I wrote (what I considered to be) a lighthearted opinion piece on self-publishing for The Guardian.)¹ Women online don’t have an easy time of it anyway — she probably had dick pics coming out of her ears as it was, and now she’ll be facing extra misogyny and racism, I imagine, along with righteous fury and calls for cancellation. She has possibly completely screwed up her future job prospects, just looking at this discussion about her on Reddit. Employers Google you. Unless she can game the AI algorithms to bury it, they will not like what they find. Although I rather liked this plot twist from

Jack Hooper

where she “decides to retroactively make her research about this so that she can claim she was doing it all for science.”

I’m not against AI, either, despite my concerns. I’m no Luddite; you’re not going to winkle the programmer out of me any time soon. I use it. Not for writing, because I’m a writer. That would be dumb. But for doing things I am completely crap at, like spell-checking (yes, Grammarly), finding short shareable snippets from my long-form work, and coming up with marketing ideas (hahahahaha, yeah, we writers desperately need marketing assistants). There are ways of using AI fruitfully to help you get your writing in front of more eyes, and even to free up more time to actually write.²

So you can see how people who are crap at writing would use it for writing. Why wouldn’t they? Words are powerful. And if spending 5 minutes a day will get you kudos and an income, who cares if it drowns real writers out of the writing market? Well, writers care, obviously. And hopefully, just enough readers who value the thoughts of skilled individuals (artisans, if you will) rather than content produced by something without a heart.

AI is causing many of us artists and artisans both headaches and heartache, but there is room for nuance. I have fascinating friends who persuade me of generative AI’s democratic and creative possibilities. When

Simon Indelicate

turns his genius to the joys of Italian Brainrot, I see the necessity for case-by-case consideration. (And please note, the widely touted environmental concerns about AI have been debunked).

Do we want whole AI-written Substack posts, though?

Apparently, we do. Or we think we don’t, but we can’t tell the difference.

Linda Caroll

’s Are Popular Substackers Using AI?, and

Will Storr

’s Scamming Substack have recently revealed that a huge number of those making the most money out of Substack (and having viral success) aren’t writing their own posts. They’re just entering a prompt (5 minutes max) and getting AI to give them what the masses are after. Culled from mass consciousness, geared to mass consciousness, from the people-pleasers extraordinary, ChatGPT and Claude. These algorithms are geared up to tell you whatever you want to hear, even if it’s a lie. This is why we got a newspaper running a summer reading list with made-up books. Indeed, if you read the most disturbing evidence on this so far from

Amanda Guinzburg

, you’ll conclude that if AI has any kind of personality at all, it is the personality of sociopath. And let’s not forget that a recent iteration of Claude resorted to blackmail.

Do I want a sociopath writing my marketing materials? That is one to ponder, for sure. I’m still veering towards yes, because otherwise it would have to be me.

Do I want a sociopath writing my reading materials? Absolutely not.

Who will stop this tsunami of AI-written content? No one will. In an article called Algorithm Proofing: Why the explosion of AI means the end of easy discovery on social media, Jay Clouse explores the prediction that within 24 months, all social media will be “pay to play” because of the rise of AI, with AI-sourced content swamping human content by a factor of 9 or 10 to 1.

But will mass production make origination and creation extinct?

Of course not. AI only recycles what’s already out there. The kind of synthesis that leads to originality still resides only in the human brain. My understanding of the nature of consciousness entirely denies AI the possibility of gaining it.

We should not be afraid of the future, those of us who value original thought and human creation. We are the ones retaining the ability to think for ourselves. In a world where so many are outsourcing their thinking, we will hold an advantage.

So long as we find ways to stay visible.

So long as we stay connected to each other.

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I’m writing about the Seven Deadly Sins. Previously:

• Original Sin: Christianity’s Biggest Lie

• What I Learned About Lust From a Monk, A Marriage and a Breakdown

• Gluttony for Punishment: How three cakes a day saved my sanity

• I was Zen, and now I want to punch someone in the face

Paid subscribers can join the Seven Deadly Sins Writing Challenge: a therapeutic practice to rid yourself of your baggage through the art of spewing words onto the page. No priests required! Your writing challenge post will arrive in your inboxes on Tuesday.

Next Week:

Something exciting has happened, and it seems very likely that I shall have to take a short break from my Seven Deadly Sins series to surf a little wave of joy next week and perhaps beyond. I will return to sinning as soon as I can.

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Tagging other interested parties in this discussion:

CM Torres

1. The main things that got me into trouble, apart from my attempts at humour, were the heading and subheading, over which I had zero control or notification. I didn’t write them, and they’re not even accurate. I don’t live in “poverty” for starters (I did, when I was a student, get down to my last 7 pence, but that was a while ago). Also, and most importantly, I AM NOT AGAINST SELF-PUBLISHING. Even at the time of writing, I had a self-published non-fiction book for sale on the Leanpub platform. It’s simply that I know all too well that a) I am not a marketer (and you need to be, unless you have vasts sums of cash to pay someone else to be one on your behalf) and b) literary/upmarket fiction doesn’t thrive when self-published unless you are seriously famous, a genius self-promoter, or Virginia Woolf. I am none of those things.

2. This piece on the Royal Literary Fund website caught my eye regarding how writers can use AI fruitfully: https://www.rlf.org.uk/posts/10-ways-ai-can-help-writers/