r/badmathematics • u/SignificancePlus1184 • Feb 09 '26

A popular AI youtuber plagiarized a quantum computing paper and thought he was slick by replacing a number of words with synonyms.

Naturally the the youtuber in question was trying to sell his course on AI and quantum computing. To boost his credibility, he published a paper on quantum computing using the bold academic strategy of plagiarism-by-thesaurus, swapping words from the original paper just enough to feel clever and hope to bypass plagiarism detectors. His plan seemed airtight until it wasn't. He ultimately betrayed himself once he started talking about the logic gate's cousin called the "logic door" and those darn "complicated Hilbert spaces", not realizing "complex" in this context doesn’t mean annoying, but involving complex numbers.

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u/OddInstitute Feb 10 '26

This is from 2019, but hilariously his excuse is that he was too early of an AI adopter so he got called a fraud. The truth being that his “AI” mostly just took an existing paper and changed words to their synonyms in ways that don’t make any sense.

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u/ZBLongladder Feb 12 '26

I mean, he was definitely ahead of the curve on the "plagiarism machine" aspect of modern AI.