Wish I'd saved the solicitation, FishWatcher.
Sometime in the last year I received an emailed salesletter for some automatic-article-writing software that would do exactly this.
It was being marketed to blackhat Adwords bloggers who were wanting to game Google by putting up thousands of trash blogs tied to specific keywords.
You would type in the keywords or subject you wanted an article written about and the software would search the online article directories and (maybe the web at large, I don't recall) and make supposedly intelligent selections of pertinent material and grab a little here and a little there and piece them together to compose and publish your article for you on your trash blog.
I was disgusted with the idea and the salesletter's claim that this was not plagiarism, but "fair use" and the kind of legitimate research that all writers do. (But I'm especially sensitive about such things, having made my living as a writer forever.)
And I didn't really believe that it would work; that is, that the software would make intelligent and coherent pairings of sentences and paragraphs swiped from a variety of articles.
You have me wondering now if we are seeing that software in action.
If so, unethical and stupid as it do be, it's got some pretty smart cutting and pasting going on.
Best,
kwc
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k e n . w i n s t o n . c a i n e
full of natural goodness since 1952
editor, http://www.mindbodyspiritjournal.com
sharing holistic how-to since 1992
Thanks Ken! I've heard about software like this, but find it hard to believe that someone would be so clueless as to use it. Why would a legitimate business risk turning off so many people? This stuff is not that hard to track. Flash-in-the-pan spammers and content aggregators playing the Adsense game, well I could see them going for it. They're just trying to stay one step ahead of Google, making millions before Google gets wise to them.
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