Creating a successful blog post, especially one that details a new project like DinkySub, feels great. Even better is having other platforms recognise it. But, as a new founder, I am, of course, obsessively interested in how my platform is performing, and as such, I spend far too much time searching for it myself. One search, simply typing the word "DinkySub" into Google to see if the word is spreading, showed me a different problem: AI content theft by other bloggers.
Their Goal: Speeding Up Creation with AI
In my original blog post, I wrote about how I had created DinkySub as an attempt to escape the office and spend more time with my family.
When …
Creating a successful blog post, especially one that details a new project like DinkySub, feels great. Even better is having other platforms recognise it. But, as a new founder, I am, of course, obsessively interested in how my platform is performing, and as such, I spend far too much time searching for it myself. One search, simply typing the word "DinkySub" into Google to see if the word is spreading, showed me a different problem: AI content theft by other bloggers.
Their Goal: Speeding Up Creation with AI
In my original blog post, I wrote about how I had created DinkySub as an attempt to escape the office and spend more time with my family.
When I recently checked Google for "DinkySub" to see how the post was ranking, I expected to see my original dev.to article and maybe some project pages. I did. But I also found copies and rewrites appearing on other sites. For a normal blog post, it may be hard to notice. But when the AI forgets to change the project names, they become easy to find.
The Direct Plagiarist: Fatih Soysal A post attributed to Fatih Soysal. This content was my original article, translated into Turkish, and completely rewritten using AI, likely to bypass detection. The author presented it as if they were the creator of DinkySub with zero attribution or links back to the original article. This looks like a case of automated plagiarism with the author (if he even exists as a real person) not even proofreading the results.
The Corporate Huckster: Q2BSTUDIO The most egregious case was from Q2BSTUDIO, a software development company. They took a Spanish translation of my original post and placed it on their company blog. The article uses my first-person narrative ("I launched DinkySub...") but then uses the entire story as a case study to advertise their own services:
"En Q2BSTUDIO entendemos esta filosofía aplicada a clientes y productos. Como empresa de desarrollo de software ofrecemos servicios..." They are essentially claiming my personal journey and intellectual property—including the success story of DinkySub—to sell their own business services, all without a single word of attribution.
A frustrating reality The combination of content scrapers and powerful Large Language Models makes automated plagiarism easier, faster, and more effective at hiding than ever before. In my case, I could easily find the unique word associated with my product, but in most cases, where blog posts are for a discussion of a technology, the posts can be copied and reused without anyone noticing.
Your Story The Dev.To platform is a great place for content. And therefore a great place for scraping. Have you found any of your articles to be plagiarised? Did it look like an AI automated job to you?