I Made It. I'm A Real Writer Now.
A random lady on the internet plagiarized me and I won't shut up about it
I always dreamed this day would come.
My work has been plagiarized.
If you’re a subscriber, you may remember this essay I put out in February:
That Vintage Isn't Overpriced
When I first started selling vintage, I felt the constant need to defend my work. Every eye roll at a price tag felt like a personal attack, every insulting offer for a “better” price was wou…
It isn’t the most successful piece I’ve ever published on Substack, but it was the basis for my most successful Instagram post. At a measly 6,000 followers, it garnered me the kind of engagement that an account of my size rarely ever sees.
But much more importantly, it made the people I care about feel seen and heard. I got so many thankful comments and messages, and reactions lit up the Slack channel for the vintage collective I sell at here in New York. The fellow dealers I respect and admire so much spent half an hour expressing their genuine appreciation for my work, calling me “a really funny writer” amongst various other compliments I promise I’ll stop bragging about right… now.
I couldn’t think of anything more fulfilling. This is exactly why I write.
Earlier this month, someone else’s post about the same topic started to make the rounds on the vintage side of Instagram. Even after seeing it reposted a dozen times, I somehow didn’t consider that I may have actually inspired it myself. Vintage pricing is something that everyone in the industry thinks about constantly, so it made sense that other people would be tackling the same ideas online. I was just excited to see someone else talking about it too!
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t actually bother reading the slides - I had spent months working on drafts of my own piece, and I was a little burnt out on the topic myself.
Weeks later yet another person I follow reposted it, adding that they “weren’t surprised that the post had a million likes and shares” (or something along those lines). They continued on to repost multiple more slides with their own added commentary, which got me to actually stop and really read it for the first time.
They say your ears burn when someone is talking about you, or that a sudden and inexplicable sense of doom is the evil eye. What’s the name for the feeling when you’re hit with a foreboding sense of recognition upon reading the phrase “dig through a SHEIN graveyard”?
Sure, it was oddly specific. But it coulddddd be a coincidence… right?
It seemed even more likely that the poster had read my essay two months ago, and the imagery of the thrift store as a SHEIN graveyard was so compelling that it got stuck in their brain. It’s something that happens to all of us, and definitely not anything close to what I’d consider plagiarism. In fact, I don’t even know that I came up with that metaphor myself. It’s just as likely that someone else said it before me, and that it was a catchy little phrase that had taken on a life of its own.
I finally read the post in its entirety.
With increasing dread at each swipe, I quickly realized that any illusion of coincidence was laughable. I was looking at a rearranged, chopped down version of my own words. In some slides, the plagiarism was a bit more creative. In others, it was little more than copy pasting with a few added punctuation marks.
What the fuck??
Within two seconds of scrolling this user’s page, it became very apparent that they are a frequent and enthusiastic user of generative AI. In my naivete, my first reaction was to give them the benefit of the doubt - perhaps this wasn’t malicious plagiarism, but an ignorant yet overzealous reliance on notoriously sticky-fingered technology. Maybe this person had leaned a bit too heavily on an LLM that had scraped the internet and spit out a bad club remix to my Substack essay, unbeknownst to the so-called author.
After asking a few people for advice (including my beloved vintage collective Slack channel) I decided to send them a DM. I expressed my disappointment at the obvious copying, but still offered up an opportunity to correct the situation privately.
While I waited for a response, I engaged in one of the most sacred pastimes of Millenial women across America: internet sleuthing. My best friend had already put her jaunty detective cap on while I wasn’t looking. The thief didn’t follow me on Instagram, but their username did show up in the likes of my post. Feigning complete ignorance was now out of the question.
Then my friend texted me. Did you see their Substack?
What was it, my first day on the world wide web? I missed their fucking Linktree! My middle school self would have momentarily looked away from HTML coding her Xanga to give me a disappointed eye roll. As it turns out, the plagiarizer had liked and restacked my post days after it was published.
At this point, any goodwill I had about blaming AI had pretty much gone out the window. My heart raced as I scrolled through their Substack posts, searching for further evidence of intellectual burglary. They had, thankfully, not attempted to steal my essay beyond the offending Instagram post. They did, however, “write” with great enthusiasm about utilizing AI for their vintage “writing.” I’m letting the quotation marks do some heavy lifting here, as I’m dubious about applying that particular word to AI-generated content - even if it’s supposedly only used for editing. Some of us still find writing sacred (roll your eyes, whatever) and have never, ever, typed a single word into Chat GPT or any of its cursed ilk.
I was particularly struck by this passage, given the situation I had currently found myself in:
Something that really bothered me about about the stolen Instagram post was the number of fawning comments from people I knew and respected.
Louder for the people in the back!
Thank you so much for putting all of this into words.
Omg I can’t like this enough times.
I was even more pissed off about the oh-so-gracious replies, offering up dozens of emoji-laded you’re welcomes!
But the worst part of it all? The fucking AI.
The evidence is pretty solid, but I can’t say with 100% certainty that AI was used to liquify my work into easily digestible chicken nuggets of content. But I can say with 100% certainty that AI was used to generate the “photos” used in the post. Most of the slides showed that characteristic glow, littered with the telltale mistakes of AI-generated nonsense. I’m not sure if I would have consented to my words being used for someone else’s content if I had been asked, but I definitely would never have consented to my words being superimposed over AI slop of imaginary vintage dresses.
Ironically, my most successful post here on Substack is an impassioned tirade against AI use in vintage. The jokes write themselves.
Approximately eleven hours later, a deeply unsatisfying message landed in my inbox.
“Just seeing this now!” (We don’t follow each other, so I could believe this)
“I did pull a lot of info from a few articles and I am sure one of them was yours after looking at your Substack article.” (This part I didn’t believe in the slightest)
A remedial tag on a 17-day-old Instagram grid post would be like rolling the credits after the cleaning lights go on in the movie theater. Unless someone forgot their jacket, nobody was even going to see it. The credit I deserved was long gone.
I drafted a reply in the notes app, and asked my husband and best friend for their approval before sending. Though I’ve gotten braver in my 30’s, I’m generally pretty non-confrontational. I sat on the wall of text for a day, nervous about actually hitting send. I believed in everything I was saying, and the proof was in the AI-generated pudding - why did it feel so scary to just stand up for myself?
I was left on read, and the post disappeared.
The day after that, they doubled down with a very Chat GPT Claude-y (their LLM of choice, sorry!) sounding response. I opened the message seconds after it appeared on my lock screen.
I want to be clear that it wasn’t created by copying your article.
Sure, Jan.
My husband aptly pointed out their choice of the word “archive” instead of “delete.” He suspects that this person planned on un-archiving the post after enough time had passed, in the hopes that I’d simply forget and move on. I sort of assume they’ll catch wind about what I’ve written here, so here’s to hoping that this anonymous call out dissuades them from the idea. I may not like sending confrontational messages, but I can hold a grudge like a motherfucker.
Then, I went back and forth about whether or not I wanted to talk about this publicly.
You’ve obviously noticed by now that I’ve hidden the plagiarizer’s handle and username. Sure, the petty part of me just doesn’t want to give them any more free engagement. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Venn diagram of “gleeful plagiarizers” and “people who think all press is good press” is a circle. But the more mature part of me (calmed by a week of offline venting and the catharsis of writing this) knows that naming and shaming really isn’t the point.
I have no interest in “cancelling” anyone, or leading an online mob with digital pitchforks. The entire purpose of my original article was to explain value, to defend my hard work as a dealer, and to help people understand why I deserve what I ask for. What would all of that even mean if I couldn’t also stand up for myself as a writer?
The situation has also made for a truly excellent real-life example of a point I’ve been making for months: AI doesn’t belong in vintage.
This type of intellectual theft feels like an inevitable outcome of using LLMs and generative AI in creative fields like writing, vintage, and content creation. AI doesn’t actually have thoughts or ideas, so when you ask Chat GPT or Claude for thoughts and ideas, it basically has no choice but to steal. If it isn’t lifted outright like it was in the case of my essay, it’s a slower, more insidious version of copying that spans hundreds of thousands of works over years of training. The end result, however, is the same: unoriginal “ideas” pieced together using the stolen contributions of their unwilling and unconsenting creators.
And beyond the whole issue of theft, AI is notorious for fucking up. It spits out incorrect information, is agreeable to the point of delusion, and fails to accurately render anything that could be considered a realistic depiction of actual clothes.
AI is a ridiculously unreliable source for information-based tasks like accurately dating vintage, learning fashion history, or researching brands and labels. It doesn’t make sense to use in any professional capacity, and I personally don’t find it believable for anyone to claim authority or trustworthiness while simultaneously relying on AI to “work” for them.
If you’re looking for shortcuts, vintage probably isn’t for you.
Vintage is simply not a quick and easy industry. The sheer amount of labor required makes it overwhelmingly inefficient, one of the biggest hurdles faced by big business trying to cash in on the popularity of the secondhand market. In 2024, sustainable fashion journalist Alden Wicker wrote about the problem of profitability for the BBC. While Forbes published a piece the same year about how luxury secondhand giant TheRealReal “may have turned the corner to profits,” the company is still reporting net losses - for the fifteenth year in a row.
But for us little guys, part of the beauty lies in the work itself. There’s something to be said for the hours spent hand washing and photographing and getting lost in an archive of slightly lopsided scans of 1970’s catalogs. The dedication and commitment inspires us to do things the right way, even if that usually means slower and for less money. I find it incredibly ironic to use AI to generate a post defending the passion and labor of dealers and collectors when AI goes against all of the things we’re working so hard to defend in the first place.
Outside of vintage, the burgeoning world of AI is littered with devastation. The massive, emissions-heavy data centers required to power AI are disproportionately harming Black and Latino communities, Clearview AI entered into a $9.2 million surveillance contract with ICE last year, and AI-powered targeting systems are being used by Israeli forces to accelerate the genocide of the Palestinian people. While individuals can never amount to the impact of the corporations and governments sanctioning such sweeping and harmful utilizations of AI, every user out there is still inadvertently helping bolster value, train systems, and normalize use.
But I’ll try not to leave you in a pit of gloom and despair.
Most of the dealers in secondhand are working really hard to do what they love - preserving beautiful garments, educating people on fashion history and its sweeping cultural impacts, and sharing it all with a like-minded community. Without any AI!
Starting my vintage business six years ago changed my life. It’s brought me from stuffy attics to glorious showrooms in the company of some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. I love what I do, I love the people in it, and god damn do I love the clothes and the jewelry and the bags and all of the other weird little things we’ve dedicated our lives to saving and repairing and rehoming.
This whole ridiculous story isn’t without its silver linings. If anything, this fiasco just proved to me that my writing is good! My brain is juicy, my ideas are sexy, and the watered-down, AI slop version of my musings still hit. My work is so good, in fact, that people want to steal it for themselves. I would really prefer it if they didn’t, but knowing the desire is there is still affirmation that I’m going in the right direction.
I also learned I have no idea how the fuck to spell plagiarise. Thank god for good old fashioned spell check.
YOU’RE THE REAL REAL DEAL
Handled exceptionally well!