Since I Am Loved

Posted by Victor Mair

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"It cannot read the human heart" by Yan Ge (b/1984), London Review of Books Blog (2/20/26)

Since November 2024, a book influencer on RedNote has been publishing posts featuring side-by-side excerpts from works by different authors that contained similar, and in many cases identical, sentences and paragraphs. Among those whose sentences, similes, descriptions, scenes and plotlines appeared to have been copied and pasted were Eileen Chang, Hsien-yung Pai, William Faulkner, Orhan Pamuk, Annie Proulx and Gabriel García Márquez. The perpetrators of the apparent plagiarism were a number of contemporary Chinese authors.

‘Why are so many writers “borrowing” from others’ work?’ my friend asked. ‘Is this some kind of open secret in the literary world?’

I had no answer. In more than twenty years as a writer, I have previously encountered only a couple of incidents of outright literary theft (as opposed to quotation or allusion). Both times, I was baffled by it. Plagiarism, it seems to me, is a humiliating admission of artistic failure.

Digging deeper into the causes for the widespread plagiarism that she was encountering, Yan discovered one potential reason for the rapid rise in these corrupt practice cases:

The discovery was made possible by AI-powered plagiarism-checking applications, but some people have suggested that the plagiarism itself may have been fostered by the use of large language models. Given the data that AI models are trained on, wasn’t it possible – inevitable, even – that any writer who used AI for prompting or editing would end up copying, inadvertently, the work of others? The trouble is that much of the apparent plagiarism was published in the early 2000s or the 1990s. So unless someone invents a time machine, the theory doesn’t hold.

Moreover, says Yan, 

If plagiarism is defined as having sentences flagged as identical by a checker, then so be it. But the software can only scan texts mechanically; it cannot read the human heart … This so-called reader who exposed the identical texts, you are not a reader in any real sense. You just used the software, being too lazy to read anything yourself … You are merely a reader who is not illiterate.

There is yet one more outré hypothesis about what may have served to promote plagiarism:

Other online analysts noted that a number of the authors involved had attended creative writing MFA programmes, which have been a feature of Chinese universities for the last fifteen years or so. ‘So this is how they teach writing in the universities,’ people speculated. ‘They simply get the students to memorise the classics and graft the masters’ sentences into their imitations.’ The opinion echoed a long-running scepticism towards the institutionalisation ­– or, as some would have it, the industrialisation ­– of writing.

In the final analysis, after consulting with another friend, Yan came to the conclusion that the plagiarizers were doing it for money.  Creative writing, especially for state-funded journals, is so highly lucrative that, if you steadily churn out one or two stories a month for them, before long you will be in the top five per cent income bracket.

Yan has been writing in English in addition to Mandarin and Sichuanese. Her first English book is a 2023 short story collection Elsewhere: stories. Reviewer Chelsea Leu wrote

Yan Ge’s English debut is preoccupied with language, its failures, and its relationship to human emotions and the raw reality – the 'food' – of life. … These stories map out the distance between the head and the gut – the way language can fail to convey the deepest, most visceral facts of life."

Reviewer Sindya Bhanoo wrote that the stories "explore the power of language across the Chinese diaspora to either bring people together or push them apart."

(Wikipedia)

If there's not a dramatic turnaround soon, these practices will take all of the fun out of writing — and reading.

Selected readings

• "Tik Tok and Red Book" (1/19/25)
• "AI plagiarism" (1/4/24)
• "John McIntyre on varieties of plagiarism" (3/30/13)

[h.t. John Rohsenow and thanks to Jing Hu]]

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