AI presents a possible opportunity to detect plagiarism on Steemit, and to remove articles and sanction the users according to current or commonly accepted protocol.
A semantic AI engine may parse through articles, and act as a moderator comparing new articles with existing ones, scoring them through similarities. This would prevent the same article being posted twice, even when it has been altered. Existing plagiarism engines don't do a good job at it, as they simply compare original content. A semantic AI understands context, and thus it can notice more subtle differences, such as articles that have been rewritten, but contain the same content as the original article - explained in other words by the plagiarist.
I'm not an expert in AI development, but I am an amateur. So, here I point to a few examples that may be used as bots:
Commercial
Open source
http://www.cyc.com/platform/opencyc/
I suppose that Steem has an API they can connect to. An API would make installing such a bot simple.
The bot can work as a part of Steem, or it can be a third party service tied to a user. The bot might even earn Steem Power for successful services. As a third party service, it could possibly put a scoremark on an article that it has been scanned and approved.
Any ideas how this could work?
I'm on Steem for the first week, so I'm still not fully aware of how it works on the technical level, but suggestions would be highly useful in any case, if anyone wanted to make such a service.
Do you think there is even a need to fight plagiarism?
I understand that content creators will be turned off if they see others profiting from their work but the community will detect plagiarism and act accordingly.
As long as content is still new to most of the community why should it not be rewarded for being reposted? I understand that etiquette teaches one to despise reposts, but I think the design of the platform allows original content to be rewarded most highly. Reposts will only be rewarded by those who missed it the first time around and so on until the community no longer rewards the content. A creator who turns out regular original content will enjoy the most rewards.
I think that having a bot say that the article is a copy even by marking it as a referral to the original would be useful to the community. It would be about as useful as discovering the original source of a trending news story.
Plus, I'm lazy. Out of the treding stories on the frontpage, they have quite a few copied articles where people say it's copied. I noticed that I just stop reading the content at that point and go for the next.
Yeah it would be nice to have a bot that flagged reposted content. Perhaps nothing more intrusive than that.