It has come to my attention that Joe over at GoReadingBerks is back to his old shenanigans. Someone linked me his latest article on Blue Marsh and let me know that he scraped the interactive Blue Marsh map I spent months putting together to claim as his own. If you’re new to following me this project is one I undertook between the Fall of 2023 through the Spring of 2024; it also included visiting sites around the lake and exploring the remains of the properties that were taken. 

About a year ago Joe was busted taking the article I researched and wrote about the collapsed building on North 4th street, running it through AI and posting it as his own. It may have seemed to my viewers that it was a one-off occurrence but the reality is it was the culmination of years of trying to get this guy to stop copying everything I do. With local history there’s obviously going to be some overlap in covering the same material from the same root sources. Yet copy pasting my words and running it through AI, scraping my map data or posting I photo I took of Stone Willie’s grave after cropping it to remove my watermark are blatant and malicious attempts at undermining my authenticity, time and work. I am really unsure how else to take it.

Anyway, this time I am not going to get angry or aggressive about it because he clearly learned nothing from that and will never change; so that’s not a good use of my energy. But I do want to take this as an opportunity to have a conversation with my following about AI generated content and its impact on us locally. I know AI is a topic that has been covered extensively on a broader level. It’s here and it is effecting nearly everything we read on our screens. It is more difficult than ever to distinguish what is human.

I ran this piece (which I may add is titled the same as a book published by Joe Swope a decade ago, a great first-hand experience of what it was like to lose ones property to the formation of the lake and I recommend to anyone interested in the topic) and others through the gamut of AI detectors, and nearly every single one concluded that the vast majority of this article is AI generated. What I assume is happening, since Joe has a distinct history of straight up plagiarizing books and articles written by others, is that he now just runs them through AI to obscure the fact that it has been stolen. I am aware that these AI detectors are not perfect, sometimes even original works will trigger the alarm, but I also ran a bunch of my own articles through and as expected they found nothing. Don’t take my word for it; check it out yourself. I recommend Copyleaks but any on the first page of Google will do.

Even disregarding AI detection, because as time goes on the generators are going to continue to find ways to outsmart the detectors, there’s something strange about these articles. If you ever read them you probably know what I mean. It reads more like a fluffy novella than a historic account. I have never read so many words that say so little. 

I have also noticed on social media – new accounts popping up posting completely AI-generated video, audio and information. Much of the information included completely wrong. For example there is an account on tiktok with thousands of followers that had an entire video about the legacy of Hess’ Department store in downtown Reading. For those of us who know better it is absolutely bizarre. For those who don’t we must ask ourselves, what exactly is the point of obscuring reality in this way on a platform whose user base leans younger and has lesser chance of knowing the truth?

I want to take a moment to say I am by no means anti-AI. I believe it can play a significant and important role in aiding human creativity. While the vast majority of my videos include my drone footage or myself, I have utilized short AI generated or stock clips when I feel it can enhance the story I am telling. Also, when I colorize photos in Adobe Photoshop, the filter I use is AI-based, which gives a color starting point after which I go back and edit and enhance by hand. It saves me time and makes my work better. 

Another key point to this is that Joe moved states away from here in the late 1990s. It is not inherently an issue that people who moved away from Berks are still interested in the history of the place they grew up. I think that is great and know that that encompasses a very large number of my own following. Yet none of them are promoting themselves as the #1 Source for History and Facts about a place they haven’t even lived in nearly three decades. Ultimately, it’s dishonest. How do we reckon with the fact that someone who has no direct physical contact with our day to day world plays a part in driving our narrative? On a national level that’s somewhat unavoidable, but the one thing I hold on to is that the hyper local level may be the last bastion we have any sort of control over the truth.

This leaves us to ponder the ethical implications of our current digital landscape. Whether the content he is publishing is bastardized from another’s work, or really is just purely AI generated, I would argue it is actually harming the community he claims to care about. When people search the internet for the title of Swope’s book, you would rather your robo-generated article outrank the words of a man who actually lived the experience? This tells me everything I need to know about you. You do this not for love of local history or appreciation of what came before; you care only about you. A sick and pervasive trend that seems to be creeping into almost every facet of our society.

Is it on us as consumers to take responsibility for making sure the content we choose to indulge in comes from a place of integrity? It seems like an almost impossible task given the rate that we now intake information.

At the end of the day perhaps no one really cares anymore. Maybe now we are all a part of a machine of churning out and consuming content, regardless of whether it has any basis in truth, integrity or reality. Maybe eventually the entire internet will be AI’s interpretation of something created by some forgotten human. Perhaps after it replaces all of our creatives and some of our jobs it will come rewrite our local history and culture too. That’s not the world I want to live in, so I am going to continuing doing what I do.