Money for Slop: How Greed Turns Writers into Thieves
The Maalvika Bhat scandal and AI-generated Bestsellers
“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…
