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Pulling my comment out of a thread because I think it's important: nearly all of this article is plagiarized from years-old sources. Search any sentence with a
by burkaman 3y ago
Pulling my comment out of a thread because I think it's important: nearly all of this article is plagiarized from years-old sources. Search any sentence with a number in it and you'll find it somewhere else. A few examples:
> At the end of 2021, Portugal became coal-free after shutting down its 628MW Pego coal-fired power plant...
https://www.energymonitor.ai/power/what-europe-can-learn-from-portugals-accelerated-coal-exit/ https://www.energymonitor.ai/power/what-europe-can-learn-fro..., March 2022
> In January 2022, 4,085 GWh of electricity were generated in mainland Portugal...
https://www.unav.edu/web/global-affairs/portugal-a-strong-bet-on-renewables-to-reduce-its-energy-dependency https://www.unav.edu/web/global-affairs/portugal-a-strong-be..., February 2022
> In the same year, Electricity was the 7th most imported product in Portugal.
https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/electricity/reporter/prt https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/electricity/r...
> On February 4th, 2022, China Three Gorges (Europe), S.A. notified EDP that...
https://www.edp.com/sites/default/files/2022-02/20220204_CTG%20Shareholding%20Position%20EN.pdf https://www.edp.com/sites/default/files/2022-02/20220204_CTG..., February 2022
> Unfortunately, Portugal has some of the highest prices for electricity in Europe thanks to taxes...
Not sure the original source, but I found this quote verbatim in several other older articles.
Is this a real newspaper? The author of this article is apparently the publisher: https://www.theportugalnews.com/contacts https://www.theportugalnews.com/contacts. Is this is a real person, or is this like an auto-generated ad vehicle? Why is it all in English?
Edit: It does seem to be real: https://web.archive.org/web/20100601000000*/theportugalnews.com https://web.archive.org/web/20100601000000*/theportugalnews...., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portugal_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portugal_News (those references are real books). Just kind of a bizarre publication.
- baq 3y agoMaybe it’s a search-enabled LLM with a ‘use exact quotes’ prompt?
- polshaw 3y ago>Why is it all in English? I can't speak to the plagiarism aspect but this part is trivially answered; because it's a site made by an English speaker targeted at English speakers. Of which there are large numbers in Portugal, especially in the Algarve where he is from.
- burkaman 3y agoYes that makes sense, when I wrote that I was just looking at all the "related stories" under this one that have nothing to do with Portugal and wondering if this is some spam operation that had just picked the best the___news.com URL it could get. But no it is real, and looking at the print edition it does focus on Portugal, it just surrounds the news with 80% ads.
- jsf01 3y agoHow did you discover the plagiarism? Or if you searched sentences manually, what prompted you to check?
- burkaman 3y agoElsewhere in this thread somebody noted that the electricity price in the article didn't seem right, so I went to Eurostat to check myself. I couldn't figure out where they got that 0.2246 number from so I searched for it and found the first plagiarized source.
- willsmith72 3y agoEven without he plagiarism, the whole thing read like an LLM or offsite content farm (the 2 are becoming indistinguishable)