Longish note here, but hopefully people read to the end.

This was maalvika’s formal response to Katie Jagielnicka (which has suddenly taken on a far less apologetic tone than the comment she initially left in the replies of someone else’s post.) Maalvika has since also shared a screenshot of what she claims was her original essay, including statistics and references she believes shows she initially did credit Katie and tag her. The problem with that is she’s used research that wasn’t released until December 2024 - which was more than six months after she claims to have written the essay. For a person trying to present herself as a thoughtful writer and researcher, she is very sloppy.

But this first statement is worth reading, not just because it shows how determined Maalvika is to deny what is plainly obvious to anyone with eyes but also because it’s a helpful illustration of the manipulative tactics grifters rely on to muddy the waters of accusations made against them.

While Maalvika admits that she did copy and paste slabs of Katie’s words and include them uncredited in an essay that vastly expanded her reach and profits, she frames it here as having simply forgotten to attribute what she calls “a passage”. A mistake. An oversight. An error not caught because it was so tiny as to be almost imperceptible, especially in the otherwise completely original and groundbreaking thesis her own advanced brain was focused on releasing into the wild.

This is an audacious explanation. Maalvika didn’t produce a piece in which an unattributed “passage” somehow got lost, nor did she use the theme of the work for her own interpretation (which could be defended on the basis that studying algorithms and how they cause us to misinterpret the zeitgeist is a topic embedded right now in said zeitgeist - I mean, it’s not like Katie is claiming to have invented interest in studying algorithms, and writing about our own responsibility for curating them isn’t in and of itself plagiarism.)

But the opening FIVE PARAGRAPHS of Maalvika’s essay were Katie’s verbatim words, taken directly from her own published article. There is simply no way a writer publishes a piece and fails to notice the opening gambit is someone else’s word-for-word writing, inadvertently overlooked and uncredited “by accident”.

That’s not even the most damning but. Because Maalvika did rewrite one part of those five paragraphs, and it was where Katie shared how her own algorithm is shaped by what it’s learned about her interests. Maalvika was engaged with her plagiarism enough to substitute Katie’s list for her own, with no credit to her or comparison between the pair. How else is one to interpret this except as intentional theft, especially when all the other words remain exactly intact, right down to referencing creepy old men and claiming algorithms work “functionally as a library”?

Logic tells us Maalvika knew exactly what she was doing, and her claims otherwise completely lack credibility. This by necessity casts doubt on the originality of the rest of her work, and makes her an unreliable writer with deeply questionable motivations regarding her artistic ambitions.

But I also wanted to comment on her method of response, because I think it speaks further to her commitment to the narrative she’s spinning (which she may even have decided to believe).

I have to continue this in comments though (because too long!)