Parker Lewis Caught Up In Plagiarism Scandal
This article was inspired by a news tip submitted by a loyal reader.
Parker Lewis has been caught up in a plagiarism scandal this week, joining the ranks of the academics at MIT and Harvard. The scandal started after Bill Ackman used chat GPT to find that there was not an original word written in Lewis' new book. The full time podcast speaker and author has been accused of plagiarizing his own work by compiling past blog posts into a book called, "Gradually Then Suddenly." Lewis received sharp criticism for his original yet unoriginal content, which he responded to with confusion. "I'm not sure why I'm being criticized for plagiarism when I wrote all the work compiled in this book," Lewis tweeted in response to the criticism.
Bill Ackmen warned Lewis not to attack his wife like "All the big brains at MIT did." Attacking political rival's is out of character for the soft spoken Lewis, who would prefer to write a nice blog post explaining his position, over battling it out over the internet.
Many individuals are realizing that Lewis did not actually plagiarize anything and that compiling your own work into a book is a pretty straight forward and honest way to publish a book. Even still, the false accusations have lead to his reputation being tarnished as a top tier author, bringing up concerns about publishing standards for journalists and influencers levying accusations.
BTC Sessions also came under fire for alleged plagiarism in his tutorial videos. Allegations state that he has demonstrated transaction scripts written by Satoshi and other core devs without citing their commits to the codebase.
Others have pointed out that Chat GPT is guilty of plagiarizing Parker Lewis as the chat bot has been trained on Lewis' writings, often times spitting out direct quotes from his work without citation when asked about Bitcoin. This puts Chat GPT users into a precarious situation where they could be unintentionally plagiarizing Lewis' work unknowingly.
All of this shows that there is further needed discussion around what plagiarism is and how it should be handled. Unfortunately a few bad actors like Dan Held and Claudine Gay have seemed to have sparked a witch hunt, causing Parker Lewis to be an unintended casualty.
