Here's the backstory for anyone who wants to know about why the Vocaloid (and wider vocal synth) community hates her. I was on Twitter that fateful day. One of my mutuals wrote a huge Google doc correcting her, and after your original video released, I ended up finding an article she plagiarized for the Vocaloid video. As mentioned before, she made a video about Vocaloid in 2021. It was riddled with basic factual errors, and actually what caused myself and many others to stop liking her and start analyzing her content more critically. She actually had a fit and yelled at a bunch of Vocaloid fans for trying to issue corrections. Here's the list of errors she made that I could spot, if anyone is interested. - Stated that Miku is canonically always 16. Miku's age is for marketing purposes and her publisher has stated her age is meant to be fluid and she can be a jaded 87 year old if you want, along with literally everything else. Crypton says Eldritch Horror Miku is canon compliant, everyone! - Failing to cite song lyrics for the song "Miku" by Anamanaguchi. Literally just reads them out without context. - Blair forgets how Japanese name order works at several points in the video and uses character's family names as their first names, and people's first names as last names. - Throughout the video, Blair implies that the Vocaloid software is only used by EDM musicians. This is untrue. Not quite a factual error per se, but still an incredibly dumb error to make because it could be dispelled with even 5 minutes on TH-cam. There's a particularly large metal scene in the Vocaloid community, for example. - Mispronounces the name of "Kenshi Yonezu" as "Kenshi Tansu" for some reason - Cites a fake news article announcing the creation of a Hatsune Miku anime - Cites UTAU as being a commercial-ish competitor to Vocaloid when it's really more the Audacity to Vocaloid's Adobe Audition and is community-driven by the creation of free and open-source voice libraries - Cites LUCIA and LUAN (a pair of Spanish voicebanks for Vocaloid5) as being created shortly after Miku's creation by a new creator named Giuseppe. LUCIA and LUAN were created by an employee of the company that Yamaha partnered with for Vocaloid's development affairs (VoctroLabs). They were also announced about 10-ish years after Miku's release. She cites another Spanish Vocaloid, Clara as being from a competing company when in fact she was a Vocaloid3 release by VoctroLabs. They also were cancelled midway through production and never released. - Cites that the two first Vocaloids ever created, Leon and Lola, are commonly depicted as white by the fandom despite being voiced by Black singers. While this is TRUE, she leaves out that *they were portrayed by white stock photo models on the boxart by Yamaha and Zero-G (their publisher), and Zero-G did not confirm they were voiced by Black singers until over a decade later,* failing to acknowledge the hand the two companies had in the whitewashing of these vocalists by the Fandom. As old fans have become the people making commercial vocal synths, it is now considered an industry standard to portray characters as being the same race as their voice providers. - She cited the story of a Korean producer named SeeU being harassed out of the Japanese Vocaloid community. SeeU was not a producer. SeeU was a voicebank for the Vocaloid3 software, capable of singing in Japanese and Korean, with plans for English support. She never received any updates due to a mix of anti-Korean bigotry in Japan, financial troubles with her publisher, and her voice provider (Kim Dahee of the kpop group GLAM) having legal troubles. - Misattributes the late Wowaka's record label as "ballroom" when his record label was actually "baloom" - Uses a Google translated title of one of Wowaka's songs as "Front and Back Lovers" when the official translation is "Two-sided Lovers" or "Two-faced Lovers" - Cites a *FANDOM WIKI BLOG POST* asking people to credit Vocaloid producers instead of the Vocaloids themselves as the idea of crediting producers being a new-in-2021 idea, when in reality it has been considered standard crediting practice since the early 2010s that one should cite the producer, as saying a song is by Miku is like saying a song is by Piano or Drum machine. - Cites VTubers as being an evolution of the Vocaloid software. I should not need to tell you why this is incorrect.
Thanks for the summary! I was big into vocaloid around ten years ago (I still listen to it, I'm just not involved in the fandom anymore) and I would have been so pissed if I saw her video. It's almost impressive much how basic info she gets wrong.
It was hilarious to me watching her video and then Shadok's LOVEWEB about vocaloid because it's like. The difference in research and just overall video quality is drastic lol
Since this video came out, Blaire uploaded a video titled "The Dark Side of Disaster Relief" where she just straight up forgot to put her voiceover in the video, so there's a solid 5-minute chunk about 13 and a half minutes in that's just the spooky backing music and her PNGTuber avatar gesticulating in silence. HBomb made a tweet pointing this out when it was uploaded 5 months ago. That video is still up, and the section with no voiceover is still there, despite TH-cam having given creators the tools _years_ ago to replace audio tracks. In case you were wondering _just how lazy_ she could be, now you've got a pretty good answer.
I believe the Patreon cut of that video fixed the voiceover error. I forget where it was that I heard this from though, and I sure as hell am not giving Blair any money to confirm if this is true or not.
i always noticed soooo many mistakes in her videos! like the voiceover not matching the words onscreen, mispronounced words, bad grammar, sentences that don't make sense etc. audio proofreading is my side hustle so i notice a couple of those types of errors in basically every video i watch, but illuminaughti seemed to have a lot more errors than others. i tried to give the benefit of the doubt, thinking she is just a small creator who maybe can't afford a proofreader... but honestly, proofing costs like 25 to 30 dollars/hr. it takes maybe an hour and a half to proof an hour long voiceover, depending on how many errors are in it. her videos are not that long... she could probably afford it. i stopped watching her videos bc i just assumed that there were factual errors in them too, looks like i was right lmao
You’re absolutely spot on. Her video on vaccines, where she completely mangled how a vaccine works all while acting like she knew exactly what she was talking about, was the very last video of hers I watched.
Honestly, no. I knew she did MLM and she does exactly the kind of anti-capitalist topics I love listening about. Her videos got recommended to me a few years ago when I started watching CruelWorldHappyMind’s videos. But her tone was so boring and lifeless I just couldn’t finish a video. Even in a background of doing something it was too uncomfortable. And now I know why 😂 She just read someone else’s words in a monotonous voice and didn’t even care about the topic
I love the little circumcision inside joke about Silent Hill. For anyone who didn't get that, an admin on the SH Wiki kept claiming Walter Sullivan, the villain from Silent Hill The Room, was evil because he'd been circumcised as a child and that circumcision is Satanic or something like that. It was totally insane, even the developers had to tell him he was wrong if I remember correctly and he still insisted he was right.
Worth mentioning that this is also pretty antisemitic if you keep in mind that sans the weird American habit of having it done circumcision is historically a Jewish custom
Around 4:01 she says “Trust me, I hate Autism Speaks. Like, FUCK Autism Speaks.” I agree with that statement but this woman has no actual convictions, she’s just parroting the opinion she believes is popular amongst her viewers. It’s so cynical it turns my stomach.
@@Cyberweasel89 Don't feel bad for being duped by a con artist; they should be the ones ashamed of themselves, not you. The world needs more allies and she sadly took advantage of that.
Use to watch her but then she had a Lomi paid promotion and that sent of red flags. Not only did she shill snake oil but made it sound like she uses one when she doesn't
My skin crawls when she says "bla bla bla... when I'm making three videos a week _for you guys..."_ as if she does this plagiaristic content mill bullshit for anyone but herself.
so many creators do that and its so annoying, where they deflect criticism of the quality of their content by pretending they have a boss who demands a certain crazy output when really they made the decision to commit to three videos a week or 8 hours of streaming a day or whatever it is.
I think that’s also a Trojan horse for the unspoken ambition of trying to shortcut your way to a full time YT career. They want the popularity of the Nebula backed creators but need to generate enough attention so they double down on algorithm boosting tactics like ultra frequent uploads. One I actually kind of respect is Kaylasays who’s more of an editorial vlogger than a video essayist. Despite being classifiable as an amateur entertainment journalist, she has a Masters in journalism, works as a journalist as her day job, and makes a point of either not saying anything she can’t concretely back up/verify and makes it very clear when she has to go a bit more speculative along with providing additional reasons her version could be wrong.
@@vlad5042They're doing corporate "we have to increase productivity otherwise profits will be down next quarter" tactics but because it's TH-cam they get to frame themselves as the little guy who's being oppressed.
I remember watching her video about puppy farms since she bought her dog from one. At one point she talked about how much research she put into getting the right puppy and I was sat there thinking “so how did you get blind sided by a puppy farm? That’s like point number one to learn when acquiring a puppy nowadays! How did you manage to do everything wrong when sourcing a puppy?!” Now I know
I'm a super charitable person (probably too charitable), but Blair getting what appeared to be a puppy mill dog did make me a little suspicious of how much integrity she really had, and I think that's when I started to distance myself from her channel. The way she instantly started treating that dog as an accessory for her brand made me uncomfortable, too.
NOW i remember when i watched one of her videos. a friend back in high school (we're both in our 20s now) was explaining to a young oblivious teenage me about puppy mills n such and i think it was an iiluminaughtii video they showed me. if i remember right i think i ended up going and looking up stuff to read instead because i could not focus on the way she spoke dkfjghdfkj
The funniest part of her Wikipedia plagiarism apology with the Stanford Prison Experiment is that she could have just. Scrolled down to see the criticisms page to begin with and realized she was spreading misinformation. She didn’t even read the whole page
@@chickenmaster66If that was said with the intention of making people actually read wikipedia for once well you got me and I thank you for this, and the history of the page shows that the section was always named "Ethical concerns"
Not just scrolling down, it literally says in the second paragraph of the Wikipedia page, "Volunteers were chosen after assessments of psychological stability and then randomly assigned to being prisoners or prison guards. Critics have questioned the validity of these methods."
@@chickenmaster66 Each Wikipedia page has a history. In the top-right of the page, press the "View History" URL, and you'll see the list of all edits done to the page.
To think that Tom Scott recently went on-record apologising for and correcting every minor mistake he’d made over the past ten years. And the video wasn’t even that long.
The idea that every iiluminaughtii video creates a new subcommunity who knows she's full of shit is exactly right. She did a video and livestream about the obscure cult my dad was in, and I tuned in out of interest, only to find that she'd completely missed all of the interesting things about the cult. I tried to bring that information up in the livestream and she jumped on me like a Puma to accuse me of defending the cult.
Do you mind me asking what cult he was in? Admittedly I'm just fascinated in researching cults (so if you'd like to recommend other articles I'd also be interested) but I totally understand if you'd rather not
The petty part of me likes to imagine Illuminaughtii thought she was safe after the bulk of your ire in the other video was spent on Somerton. This is basically the equivalent of storming back into the room after you've gone off on someone saying, "AND ANOTHER THING!"
I'm glad he made this video because now whenever someone searches illuminaughtii, this is going to pop up. She's clearly going with a strategy of disabling all comments and pushing out videos as usual, waiting for this shit to pass so she can continue stealing others' work. So I hope new people actually watch this video before checking her out.
15:08 The guy in the documentary: "They booked the festival during the busiest weekend of the year: It's called the National Regatta. It's *LIKE* the Superbowl *THERE* " Iilluminaughtii: "McFarland had booked the Fyre festival the same weekend that the National Regatta takes place in Bermuda. This boating event is massive, *bigger than* the Super Bowl." I'm not an expert on boating sport events, but I'm fairly certain that the guy just used some analogy to emphasize the relative size and importance of this event *there*. But she used that line, to then morph it into some alternative reality where this boating event is bigger than the 6th most watched annual sporting event in the world. And just to be sure, I quickly looked it up and yes, the Superbowl has ~110 million viewers, while the National Regatta has at best some ~6 million.
this is such a perfect microcosm of the larger problem. how many hundreds of thousands of times did people hear this particular piece of misinformation? the overall impact of such a mistake might be small, but it is so existentially BAD to be filling the world with nonsense and people having no idea they are carrying it around.
It's something hbomberguy talked about in the main video, that these bad plagiarisers sometimes try to alter the wording of the things they're stealing, but because they're so bad at it, they end up actually completely changing the meaning of what they're saying. So they can't even _STEAL_ correctly.
Absolutely. I've heard tons of events described as "the Superbowl of [the niche community/interest the event is part of]" and interpreting that metaphor to mean it's literally the same size as or bigger than the Superbowl feels like just... literally not being able to understand metaphor?
@honoratagold Hbomberguy videos are like the Superbowl of nerdy video essays @xXluluchanelXx & @duffman18 Exactly! In the grand scheme of things, this random piece of information is unimportant and completely harmless to get wrong. But it is extremely indicative of the absolute laziness of these plagiarists. Like @honoratagold points out, this is *obviously* an analogy said as an analogy. It's even a very common analogy. So getting this wrong shows she is not paying attention at all to what she's even stealing from, and also that later, during the ""writing"" of the script or the recording of it, she's not paying any attention. Again, you don't need to be a sports event expert, to realise that some boating event in Bermuda isn't *bigger than the Superbowl*. If I'd accidentally written something like this, I would notice when reading and recording the script.
"Does she record these in one take?" Yes. She flubs her lines throughout entire videos. For a time I considered editing together a compilation of every time she flubbed, in a playful way. I'm glad I didn't. She probably would've been out for my blood.
You know what I find funny about Blair calling out Legal Eagle for “stealing her editing style”? Blair used to have a sponsorship from an editing company on her videos called Filmora, a video editing software she claims to use. So by her logic, anyone of her fans who downloaded Filmora based on her ad for them is now also stealing her editing style.
stuff like this really helps me put my own gaffs in perspective. like damn, I really thought accidently citing Jan de Vries or falling for a citogenesis'd fake myth was as bad as it got -R
Yeah, this is becoming an issue especially because millennials and Gen Z do a lot of video essays. Just because how to technological and structural opportunity in the format of these videos that multiple people can produce that other generations haven't had and we have grown up on their predecessor versions. So it is an innovation and timing issue and like with any new innovation we have to work out the issues that arise from it and create socio-cultural expectations. EDIT: Okay wow it took almost two weeks for me to see how "over reading" when reading my comment again seemed critical, that wasn't what I meant. Now I get all the criticism. Edited to fix.
Honest mistakes here and there are leagues better than anything grifters will ever have going on. Your work is FAR more entertaining too. Actual personality to it!
@@deiansalazar140 Please stop. We're starting to sound like our parents complaining about "This new generation is doing X or Y wrong! Back in my day...". Trust me, everyone from boomers to Gen Alpha are doing more social media than ever. But plenty across every generation are reading too. Not as much as... in the 90s sure. But this isn't something tied to generation. Let's top this fallacy now.
I used to listen to Iilluminaughtii vids while doing school work because her channel is a bottomless pit until I finished for the day. Went to watch a documentary and realized I was listening to the exact same story again. I burst out laughing at the realization she just "quoted" the whole thing.
I only heard her videos THRICE First about debunking fake traditional builder youtuber that once popular in covid era Second about debunking cute dodo that's actually just posting without context for the cuteness value And then her controversies. It's kind of sad that she once sounds so righteous (especially in her cute dodo vid) and then BAM, she's actually a shitty person
Yes! I didn't watch that many of her videos because she sounded so haughty, like she thought she was superior to everyone. Reminded me of those know-it-all types, who are never wrong even though they make half the shit they say up. -Turns out she really does think she's better than other people, and doesn't need to make shit up because she just steals it instead.
Her massive moral grandstanding has always bothered me even when I watched her. Like we get it woman you hate everything on the entire planet the whole world is pure evil and you are just the angel informing of all their crimes that inspire you to do anything you put into.
she and somerton are quite similar in that sense where they present other people's opinions at you as if they're *obviously* true and you're stupid if you disagree.
Wait, wait, wait. I learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment at the University of Washington in PSY101. This would've been almost 20 years ago. We were taught that the 'prison guards' were coached by the 'observers', and that a lot of it was BS. Essentially the story of the 'experiment' was utilized as a cautionary tale for why (double) blind studies and safety standards are so crucial in research. And she actually thought it was a proper experiment that proved something!? Post 2020!?!?
Same here. It’s a shame she went this direction too because you can totally make a good video about this “experiment.” For better or worse, Zimbardo was an interesting guy, and the way he conducted this experiment is a master class in ethics. From inserting himself in the experiment to dating one of the grad students involved, there is more than enough material here to make an interesting video
@@Usagi393 Zimbardo not only ran an ethically compromised experiment, a notion he himself uses for self-promotion, he amped up the division, encouraged guards to abuse prisoners and lied about what occurred.
I'm studying psychology at the moment and I was recently taught about the experiment. I was taught about it as if its findings were useful, but Zimbardo conducted it in an unethical manner. We did learn about some of its other limitations, but we learn a decent number of limitations for every experiment we study. It's still being treated as mostly legitimate in some schools.
As a former psych major, it was so vindicating seeing Zimbardo get discredited about the Stanford prison experiment because we had to watch so many of that fraud's videos about psychology during high school psych courses, and he was so fucking dry and intolerable.
“Did you know if you lock a bunch of protofascists in a prison and let them go apeshit on each other, they’ll go apeshit on each other and break their brains” yes, actually, and I knew that in theory and practice before man made lord of flies camp for science with similar men This period of behavioral science where it’s just like... irrevocable torture... not into that not into how we did that “I raised my son feral with a chimpanzee baby and mysteriously for some reason he later took his own life” OH YEAH?
I still agree with Zimbardo in regards to prison systems and how rehabilitation systems (a handful of countries) are better than punishment systems, which is how it is in most countries.
This feels like how my learning of the existence of antivaxxers as a child made me no longer resist getting shots. Sometimes it’s the knowledge of someone being so much worse that make you want to be better out of spite lol
@@vickypedia1308James somerton is a gay essayist that stole articles, documentaries, and essays about gay or queer topics from gay and queer makers or creators. So basically a piece of crap of a person.
The Vocaloid one is especially egregious to me because you really could make a two hour video essay about crypton reviving early internet peer production culture, or how one man created one of easiest to use 3D animation tools of the decade along with a motion capture system using the Kinect that could run on a potato, or how Vocaloid 2 allowed numerous lgbtq+ producers and VAs in Japan to breakthrough into mainstream pop, but instead she reads uncredited fandom wiki articles while failing to understand that Vocaloid is a midi instrument and not some magical anime ai software. Anyways is no one makes that two hour Mmd/moggproject video essay I will at this point out of spite.
When I followed Illumininaughtii, I frequently found myself reacting to bad reads, mispronunciations, awkward phrasings, and even misreading the literal words on the screen by saying "Wow, you realize you're allowed to do two takes, right?" In retrospect, those were all massive warning that the plagiarism was even worse than was evident.
Legit thought she might have dyslexia, dyspraxia, or eyesight issues and thought it was so cool she was kicking ass despite it. Nope, she was just copying someone else's homework and still managing to screw it up. Honestly incredible she lasted this long.
The ONLY Illuminaughti video I ever watched was the Jim Bakker one, and it pissed me off that she kept pronouncing it "Backer." Maybe it's petty, but I honestly think that was the reason I never watched her again. At the time I assumed she mispronounced it as a choice, like she smugly decided that she was the one who was saying it right and everybody else had it wrong. Now that I've seen this video and her segment in the other one, I'm inclined to think she didn't know that the correct pronunciation even existed.
I used to live here mlm stuff but when she did the sea world vid and got so much wrong (I'm obsessed with sea world) I just couldn't trust anything she had to say anymore.
As he said about speaking mistakes, I usually don’t say anything when someone’s voice bothers me - but in this case, illuminaughtii’s voiceover work is her JOB, and moreover it’s the ONLY part of her job she actually has to put the barest amount of effort into. And she trips over her words constantly, she has this weird tone that’s both monotonous and full of unnatural emphasis, and she literally sounds like she’s about to fall asleep. It’s *exactly* what happens when people read blocks of text without absorbing anything, and they end up sounding like one of those unbearable tiktok AI voices. This is the ONE thing she’s supposedly bringing to the table. And it actively makes the product worse.
I remember, because her character is recognizable, to have watched one or some few Videos of her some years back. Only now, watching this video, I remembered the feeling that made me not want to watch her after that; it was exactly the monotony, the apparent lack of care and simply obvious low-effort production, comparatively to other video-essayists, stuck out to me - however, that the root cause was this blatant misbehaviour didn't even cross my mind. How ugly.
Apparently, it's really important to get it all done in one take without time to read beforehand, so she can get back to all the other work she has to do. Making alt accounts and cyberstalking ex-friends and rivals takes up a lot of time, you know!
For me James Somerton is even worse when it comes to reading stuff on camera. He manages to sound both self-important and snobbish and like an ailing, exhausted 75 year old professor who’s about to keel over in the lecture hall. I barely got through the voice overs of his Hbomb provided for his video, because I wanted to tear my ears off listening to Somerton’s unbearable droning. Even the way he pauses towards the ends of his sentences is annoying, cause it’s clear he’s trying and failing to sound like the thoughts he read off are his own. The guy truly has negative charisma.
the main thing i noticed with these examples is that they didn't seem like mistakes of someone who has trouble reciting text. the way she tones sentences jsut sounds like she was reading the script for the first time. i heard it all the time growing up during group reads in english classes. nothing wrong with that, but its clear that its just something she's doing to maximize profit
I always thought she had a weird cadence to her speaking, then your video brought to light what was really happening. She was reading writing she wasn’t familiar with, and you can tell.
Was nobody quality checking these videos when they were done? How do you leave stumbling and mis-speaking over and over, in your videos? It's so blatant, it makes her sound low IQ sometimes.. But now we know why.
@@rhythmandblues_alibi literally, like the way she says the phrase "on a deserted island" but chops up the word into "desert ed" like she fully forgot what words she copied and pasted into her google doc and is just reading with no thoughts..... hilarious tbh
After watching your breakdown of what Iilluminaughtii was doing, I went to check the news on my local paper's website and noticed some of the tricks you mentioned in one journalist's article. Several hours of a wormhole later I can confidently say he has never written an original thing in his life and I genuinely don't know what to do with this information. Thanks for the new critical reading tools, and the bottomless feeling of disappointment.
Contacting the original writers he plagiarized as well as his boss are potential routes. If they don't do anything, spamming it all over their social media might do something. Depends on how much free time you have.
Contact the Editor in Chief of your local paper with a complaint about it while being polite. If they blow you off or just ignore you, contact any other papers in the area about it.
@@AinuLaire I've contacted the editor of a paper he most frequently reorders words from with some examples, I'm putting together a broader selection for his own paper. I'm shocked honestly
Definitely write a letter to the editor and/or publisher of the paper about it. Newsrooms are often wildly understaffed, so it's fully possible they just don't know because they haven't been able to deep-dive edit this guy's work.
Reminds me of JacksFilms bingo nights on SSSniperwolf and how they ended up finding she frequently freeboots off of freebooters. If you're so used to stealing for your content, why would you care if it's already been stolen?
I feel so sorry for the illustrator who did her little triangle head character. Not only is she trying to cease and desist that person for ???, but a lot of people (me included) have such a visceral reaction to that little character now, because Blair's been revealed to be SUCH a piece of trash.
Did she really send some legal garbage their way too? I went to their Tumblr and followed back in the day because I liked their style, so now I'm curious how they're doing 😕
It's a great design! I'd never heard of her because I don't really seek out TH-camrs so she had no reputation to lose when I watched Harry's video, but I was like "Dang I really like that character design, too bad she's an obvious fraud and idiot"
it's such a simple but cool-looking and iconic design, too. i can't imagine designing and making sprites for a growing youtuber, only for that to be plastered everywhere on the internet because said youtuber was a massive liar and manipulator btw i believe the artist's name is plaguebirb? (very skillful artist btw.) i haven't heard yet about them getting sued by iilluminaughtii, just her victims and detractors. when were they sued?
As a psychology student I had no clue it was possible to butcher Stanford that bad lmao we're literally taught it in order to talk about what was wrong with it to learn proper analysis. But then again, these people are plagiarising so they don't need to learn how to analyse, so it checks out.
it gives me such deep secondhand embarrassment like no!!! girl!!! stop!!! you dont have to do this!!!! watch more than one documentary at the very least!!!!
My AP Psych teacher in high school loved Zimbardo for some reason and taught us that it was a good experiment to show how power corrupts people. She showed a picture of her meeting him too. This was like 5 years ago so maybe it wasn’t as well known that a lot of popular psych studies have shitty experimental protocol
@@gracefoster7587 it is correct that it's a good study on power corrupting people in the sense that Zimbardo got so wrapped up in his fake persona of prison warden that he lost objectivity in the study, but a bad study on power corrupting people in terms of how it didn't achieve that aim the way it intended to and failed in too many aspects to have reliability or objectivity. The way I was taught about it was that it's a good talking point in psychology, not a good study. So correct in one sense. As for the meeting him and having an overly positive view thing, I think your teacher should have reviewed cognitive biases before choosing to be so invested in the teaching of that study lmao
Dude I’m not into psychology but even I know the basic facts about the Stanford Experiment. It’s been overwhelmingly used as the first example of scientific misconduct in ANY scientific field, even STEM. Wild to see even this is just straight up wrong and stolen
Summaries might not be considered transformative under fair use. Advertisers would be more wary of sponsoring her at the very least. If it's the same content in the same order, it might even be considered a derivative work in court - also not fair use
@@aquaintsoundThis exactly. Plus, even if she legally could get away with it, "recaps" would still get views but probably not as many; which would not be appealing to a greedy person. Also, from a purely ego-driven perspective, "I summarize documentaries" doesn't sound as impactful as calling yourself a journalist/essayist... almost like she doesn't do much of anything at all. 😅
I appreciate you trying to steer clear of pointing out people's mispronunciations in general, but you're absolutely correct to underline it during an examination of plagiarism. In college, I worked as a writing tutor, and we heavily encouraged students to read their writing aloud to us. Not only did it help them hear how their writing would sound to an audience and lead them to catch their own mistakes, but it also served to call out possible plagiarism when they couldn't pronounce or define half the words they claimed to have written.
On one hand, I tend to give people leeway. The effect of not knowing the pronunciation of a word you've only seen in print is widespread enough it has a term - calliope syndrome. On the other, I think you're exactly correct. Someone who's doing enough research would have taken the time to learn the pronunciation of at least the major terms being used in the presentation.
Not being able to define is fair but pronunciation isn't a sign of plagiarism. There's tons of words, especial academic jargon, that I had only seen written in college and didn't realize I was pronouncing incorrectly until the word was finally used in a lecture. Also I've had professors teach me the wrong pronunciation
Not being able to define words is suspicious but pronunciation isn't a sign of plagiarism. There's tons of words, especial academic jargon, that I had only seen written in college and didn't realize I was pronouncing incorrectly until the word was finally used in a lecture. Also I've had professors teach me the wrong pronunciation
It does NOT surprise me that someone wrote an entire google doc about the seaworld one. I know next to nothing about that industry, but what made me realize she was full of shit was a zoo-based video. As someone who is in the ecology community, I'm very aware of the criticism of zoos- which is why her video on zoos rang out as 100% bullshit. she did the same thing as you describe with the Autism organizations; she repeatedly says she hates PETA (and has multiple videos about how PETA sucks) but quotes organizations that are basically PETA-lite about zoos. There are a bunch of things wrong with the zoo industry, it's a very nuanced topic, but she's just reading off sources about how keeping animals in captivity is dangerous. The most galling- AND DANGEROUS- thing she did is at the end she tells people /not/ to go to accredited zoos and to instead go to local wildlife centers and nature centers. As someone who has connections to that industry.... no. just no. I recently went to a private wildlife center (in a rural area with no zoos) and witnessed a man holding a baby american alligator let a bunch of children pet it. Its mouth was not taped shut (any large crocodilian needs tape around its jaws if its going to be around people, it doesnt hurt them). That man was well meaning, I think, in starting that nature center but it is extremely irresponsible to allow that. Even a baby american alliagtor can rip off someones finger, especially a child. Many "rescue centers" operate as unaccredited zoos, which means they have NO standards they have to meet, no inspections, and no guarantee of professionalism.
I never watched the zoo video from Blair, but as a person with an interest in conservation and animal welfare, that sounds like some seriously dangerous misinformation that she's spreading.
It just occurred to me… in Folding Ideas’s Contrepeneurs, he mentions that the quote limit for ghostwriters working for a writing spam mill is 10% of the total. Which is already a lot. This is literally worse than spam writing.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I'm now remembering a lot of things that rubbed me the wrong way about Blair but I dismissed as not a big deal at the time. One of them was a video about casinos that went into detail about the psychological tricks that casinos use to keep people hooked to the machines. After saying all of that, Blair went on a strange tangent saying that she didn't necessarily have a problem with the business model and considered becoming a casino owner herself. I was like, "Wait, I thought we were talking about how BAD casinos are?" Looking back, that was definitely a case of Blair letting her true exploitative nature slip out.
I mean from your description, it sounds like she just read out a video she didn't write, then attempted to put a personal touch on the end. And the tones are completely disparate because she didn't write, or even understand it
I always watched her videos kinda casually in the background, but I caught one of her story time livestreams and something about her tone while telling the story really put me off, but I thought I was maybe misreading tone bc I struggle with that. Still ended up backing away from her content somewhat after that, but that combined with some controversial sponsors (considering her channel content) left me unsurprised when all the dirt about her came out.
Even amongst people in the niche Blair is nominally in, anti-MLM (multilevel marketing) TH-cam, Blair has a BAAAAAAD reputation for not only threatening smaller creators who displease her but also for outright stealing others' research and anecdotes without credit. I don't know of any other creator who still considers her a friend or colleague.
Iiluminaughtii seeing the original essay is mainly about James Somerton : "Phew I got off easy" HBomberguy obscur forgotten second gaming channel : "Wait a minute"
Tbf, blair had another issues to be dealing right now. Her being unethical toward former employee / collaborators hurt her brand more. Her doing plagiarism was basically just cherry on top at this point.
It's hilarious in retrospect, being someone who used to watch her MLM/Corporate Casket videos (and subsequently fell off when she started doing a lot of.. not that), that I used to read her fumbling with her script as a sign of sincerity. I thought it meant she was speaking more from her mind, remembering her research from notes and not reading and re-reading the same lines of text to get the perfect run. Now I know it's because she was reading words written by someone else which she had probably not even read once all the way through before hitting record. Pathetic.
Also, her Standford video was one that triggered some flags for me at the time as well. I gave her more credit than I should've on account of the fact that I recently had attended an entry level psych course at my University where they incorrectly taught about the experiment using the same outdated misunderstanding of it that she did. That's kind of how it goes when you have 70 old people who don't actually care about their field/don't keep up with contemporary research and just assume everything they ever learned is still as true as when it was taught 50 years ago teaching intro courses, but in hindsight it should've been MORE alarming that someone who was doing modern research didn't immediately realize how incorrect that information was.
I literally thought she might have dyspraxia or dyslexia because she misread and mispronounced so many words so often. I was like, "damn it's cool to see her succeed despite her struggles, gives me hope!" nope lmao she's just copying a smarter person's homework and somehow managing to fuck it up anyway.
i thought the same. it didn’t sound like someone just speaking from their mind instead of reading off a script - people might stumble on words as they start to say something but reword mid-sentence, or pause as they search for the word, but I don’t hear people talk like that naturally. and if she was doing that, it wouldn’t feel like it were coming from a place of sincerity - if you’re trying to put together a polished, well-researched video /essay/ for your audience, you’d want to sound like you’re familiar with the facts and that you prepared how to frame and articulate the information by writing a script, not just remember things off the top of the head and leave in distracting stumbles through the information. if you have an aside or point you’re adding on the fly it wouldn’t happen as persistently as it does with her. so because it seemed consistent but also an obvious thing that most video essayists would edit out, i chalked it up to dyslexia or something - it’s totally understandable that if she has a persistent struggle with reading the script that would turn a single line re-read into several takes, she would opt for just doing her best and presenting from the script how she would naturally. it’s like someone with a stutter not putting themselves through the exhaustion of re-recording every time their stutter pops up and instead leaving it in because it’s a natural part of how they speak. that at least seemed more sincere and not lazy to me. but nah, she’s just insincere and too lazy to both research and record lines.
A few years ago I became friends with a person on twitter who wrote freelance articles. One day she bragged to me about how she could spend a few hours in the morning googling about a subject, then write an authoritative article on the subject that afternoon before moving on to her next article. She cited one of her articles to me in a discussion about an area of pharmacology that I earned a Ph.D. in and had published original research on. I'm sharing this story because she reminds me of illuminati - doing a very shallow dive into a subject area, then plagiarizing/misunderstanding other people's work with no real clue about how lazy, inept, and Dunning-Krugerish they are.
Was she really framing it that dramatically, though? That's what I do for a living. In my experience, most of us know it's a pretty "jack of all trades" situation. It's interesting how many topics you can get introduced to in a day, and the content you're writing is essentially as authoritative as it needs to be, but it's also short. It would never make for a 10-20 minute video, they're usually articles that basically summarize information as an introduction to a field and then link sources that provide more info. And the clients are usually involved in said field, so you'd hear back if anything was improperly fact-checked. It actually sounds like your understanding of article writing might be even more shallow than her understanding of pharmacology.
It makes me mad because part of the reason people like Blair and the person you are describing exist is because primary, secondary, and post-secondary school cirriculum does such a piss poor job on teaching people sourcing. It is my full belief that it is why people believe the most absurd rumors and misinformation then continue to spread it. I understand the tech boom added to this, but there are no longer any excuses to not question what you ate reading or watching on the internet. I was in a STEM major and they drilled how to think critically about even primary sources of lit and how to properly source research and find what is considered reputable sources. You could use Wikipedia but just to help find good sources or keywords to search. Blair is the poster child of plagiarizing and would speed run getting expelled at any school that has standards.
@@kieranhair37 Vomiting half information everywhere in a pretty, readable way does not become righteous because you made it into a profession... "It's as authoritative as it need to be" If the experts in the area say it should have 0 authority, there's no argument to sustain it. Not that you would know the argument anyway, with a morning of research to summarize the work of a lifetime.
@@HouseDagothCultist The problem is that good writing and communication skills are also the work of a lifetime, and you only get one lifetime. A lot of expert knowledge is locked up in bad communication because that's only a secondary interest *at best* to the academics, it serves a real purpose for dissemination when this is done well. This is an apology from the science writers to the scientists out there - Some of us do actually try.
@@rossjames8839 Is because academia teaches people how to write in the most boring way possible. Probably because they themselves where thaught that way. I am surprise no one have thought of using video games to teach history. Probably because it would require a video game programmer who is also a historian.
Plagarism aside, I checked in on all the other "Drama" around Illuminaughtii and it would be more accurate to call it widespread abuse towards all the people around her. Pretty cartoon villain shit. It's insane that she cultivated an audience of people who hate abusive or corrupt or untrustworthy companies, while being all of those things, and not thinking it would bite her in the ass one day.
I used to be a massive fan of Blair and watched a lot of her videos back then. I showed one to my mom and she said "this video is just a bunch of articles read to me". I now realize my mom was right and Blair makes a mockery of the video essay genre. I was watching good video essayists at the time too, like Jacob geller, philosophy tube, and ofc hbomberguy. She just takes what makes a good video essay, squeezes the life out of it and patches it up with flashy editing and a sarcastic avatar
I briefly binged her videos for a while and enjoyed them, sort of like a Baby’s First Last Week Tonight without the jokes, just a brief summary of a subject. But then after a while I gave up because the huge chunks of reading quotes was boring, I felt like the delivery elsewhere felt hollow, and occasionally I’d hear her say a word totally wrong and do the biggest double take, because it just happened so often. Plus I couldn’t ever work out why the videos just sort of *ended* without a decent structure/wrap up, just an unimaginative “well that’s all we have time for” after one of the points/bits of info, and I was like “but sometimes she’s so eloquent? Why is this aspect so lazy???” Little did I know lol.
I noticed over time that the quality and tone of her videos was super inconsistent, but I thought that was because she had multiple writers, not because she was reading articles at me.
@@larissabrglum3856 that was my initial assumption too! I was like “I bet she doesn’t write much, she’s just the voice while other people on her team do all the writing”. Lol yeah but not on her team…!
Same. I found her channel and gave it a few listens... But her content felt weirdly like a high end AI reading a script. Like, yeah, a script is necessary for long form videos... But when reading your own script, most people emphasize certain points and have inflection in their tone. Especially if you're doing it professionally. You get over the middle school speech anxiety pretty damn fast. Her scripts were strange and uninspired imo. And it makes sense because she's stealing content from multiple sources that weren't written for a video essay. Video essays are a unique medium adjacent to documentaries. And when someone steals from a different medium and smashes it into a video essay... It feels off. And her videos rarely utilized the format to it's full extent. And instead opted for stock images to the point of overkill. I guess that's why she started stealing full documentaries. Also the only tone or emphasis she ever added that I noticed was a "holier than thou" attitude that even if her content was well researched and not stolen, was incredibly off putting to me. If the only passion you bring to the table is being a condescending prick... I'm not going to waste my time.
I stopped watching Blair entirely after her Roblox episode. The structure was ripped, verbatim, from People Make Games, and it just so happened I'd seen their investigation first. She threw in two citations when, if she really cared about credit, she'd have to cite the entire video. Iilluminaughtii's version was a ludicrous downgrade from her source material. PMG did genuine journalism. They interviewed several young developers who'd been worn down and exhausted by Roblox's predatory monetisation structure. Those interviews formed the backbone of the video's thesis (you know, the thing video essays are supposed to have): letting corporations exploit the labour of children primes them to accept future abuse in the workplace. Well, what does Iilluminaughtii have to say about the exact same subject matter? Exploitation... is bad. Children... should not do gambling. Grooming... also bad. Stunning and insightful analysis. She gutted an essay and converted it into a drama video. She's a drama channel. Once I realised that, I couldn't stomach any more of her output. Blair covers staggeringly dark topics such as Indigenous boarding schools and the abuse of autistic institution patients, and she does so with all the tact and compassion of a high schooler gossiping at the lunch table. She shoves Hello Fresh adverts and dog plushies next to stories of mass child graves and electroshock torture. She never questions the systemic causes of these atrocities because that'd require more thought than skimming their Wikipedia pages. A content farm in action.
I remember that Roblox episode. Another TH-camr who’s an alt right plagiarist content farmer Moon did a video on Roblox. Jack Saint did expose him. Blair isn’t educational when her channel is somehow categorized. She’s not a licensed educator and makes way more than an actual licensed teacher. Why couldn’t people realized that earlier? I always hated her and was waiting that she will have a downfall.
Well said. I remember watching one of her videos about the trafficking of Indigenous Canadian women, and the way she talked about it was just… extremely off-putting. She repeatedly stated over and over how “horrified and disgusted” she was in her “research”, but she said it in that same, monotone, bored voice and repeated it so many times that it sounded like she was trying to convince us to feel something.
Iiluminaughti really is the CinamaSins of video essayists. No effort, no passion, no artistry, just an endless content assembly line designed to get as much attention as possible with as little engagement as possible.
I’m surprised she’s managed such a following because if you don’t know the videos are literally a wiki page being read to you, they still feel like it. Just incredibly dull with nothing added unless you’re really into reacting avatars.
I'm surprised people are still dunking on CinamaSins. I haven't seen a video of theirs in a while, but people seem to be staying mad at them because they pick apart movies to death to find any and every flaw and rate it solely based on how irritating it is. Like that has been the point from the jump.
@@vvitch-mist20From what I can tell CinemaSins isn't ruining lives or anything, but a lot of their videos as of late have been them trying to genuinely criticize a film under the thin guise of "satire." It's one thing to nitpick, it's another thing to skim through the movie and just claim something is stupid because you don't get it, and then act holier than thou when people rightfully call you out
@@vvitch-mist20 For me, watching them was actually damaging to my writing abilities, because it somehow got the idea into my head that a story without clear direction for every scene and explanation of every single plot point with even a single cliché was automatically awful. They say they're doing it because "satire" but what exactly are they satirizing? They're just being mean, and claiming it's criticism, all while somehow not having a single thing they actually give any semblance of praise to
@@vvitch-mist20I kind of agree, don't know why people dunk on them so much knowing the channel's name. But I do personally think it isn't fun or enjoyable in any way to hear someone hate on different parts of movies for mostly no reason. I love watching movies and even some of the lowest rated movies I'll sit down and the watch the whole thing and get some real laughs out of it. Movies are made to be enjoyed and can definitely be enjoyed while CinemaSins is made to criticize and.... Well... Hearing people be bitter and complain about things every making moment of their existence isn't particularly fun for me.
As a VOCALOID fan i can talk for days about vocal synthesis and the science and culture behind it, but I can talk for weeks about how Blair spread so much misinformation about it, yelled at people who wrote their college thesis on it when they said she was wrong, and decided to argue with a lot of us on twitter instead of just admitting she was wrong. Needless to say, feeling a wee bit vindicated in someone deconstructing her lazy writing 😅😊
I would absolutely love to hear someone go on about it tbh, and would die to read such thesises. I would even accept someone transparently reading the thesis with permission so I can enjoy it in the background
@@samkuperman9035 got a bunch of names wrong, got the song names of a dead producer wrong, cited Crediting Discourse as being a thing in 2021 when in reality it hadn't been a thing in over a decade, thought a Korean voicebank for Vocaloid 3 was a producer, called a bunch of producers pedos bc she didn't understand that Miku's age is explicitly intended to be fluid, blamed the community entirely for a whitewashing controversy of the two first Vocaloids (Leon and Lola) even though Yamaha put white stock photo models on their boxart and didn't tell us that their VAs were black until years later (thus being the ones to first whitewash them), and threw a fit when people tried to correct her
@@samkuperman9035 oh yeah ofc just off the top of my head she claimed that SeeU was a producer (she isn't. She was the first Korean language VOCALOID voicebank for the engine and not a person), mentioned two voicebanks called Luon and Lucia and said they were made after miku had become popular (these voicebanks never finished production and were canceled), said that Miku was Crypton Future Media's second voicebank (incorrect, she was their third, MEIKO and KAITO were their first and second and were released as counterparts to eachother. Funnily enough, she never mentions KAITO) and totally misnamed artist Kenshi Yonzeu as "Kenshi Tonsu" (how do you even mess that up???), these are just things from the top of my head, its been years since i even watched that video so i know for a fact there's more in there that i cant remember.
I used to watch her when her stuff was about MLMs, but when she shifted to true crime it felt very exploitative and content farm-y, so im not surprised that shes as lazy as all this
One of the apparent things about that is her MLM content was taken from the anti-MLM community. I would have no problem with that, except that she also was alleged to refuse to give credit to all the people in the community who did the actual research, to the point that they refused to share it with her or her paid underlings. This is one of the allegations that got brushed to the wayside due to Blair’s overall abusive behavior, but it seems in line with her modus operandi.
there's a lot here obviously but the bit that grinds my gears the most is when she says "someone else had an entire box of pillows, and it became barbaric." Blair has rephrased the documentary in such a way that she's saying that the box of pillows became barbaric
Yeah, for me it was the "Focus on the Family" video. My reactions went from "Huh. I suppose she's too young to remember what they were like before the PR campaign to" "Holy shit, is she just quoting their PR material?" all the way to "Oh wow, you're just reading the wiki page verbatim..." As someone whose parents were balls deep in that craziness for half of the 1990s, it was a pretty jarring collision with reality.
Almost want to check out that video now lol, I never knew she even touched the topic. My parents have always supported Focus on the Family, so I grew up with that stuff. Have fond memories of some Adventures in Odyssey, but not much else.
@@annaairahala9462 I should watch that video just to see how bad it is. Focus on the Family was my childhood in an even greater way as my dad and grandpa actually worked for them for nearly a decade in the 90s and early 2000s. That sh*t was pounded into my brain since I was born. Totally f*cked me up growing up as a gay kid in that environment, but I got out of it around 14 or 15 and finally accepted myself and I'm now in college, far away from all of that.
I'm so glad you brought up the fact that the Stanford Prison Experiment is bs. It was basically just a play the Zimbardo directed and tried to pass off as a psychology experiment.
Have you ever heard of those psychological experiments where someone places people in an uncomfortable situation and expects them to either fall in love and furiously make love or to hurt and possibly unalive each other, but then they're surprised that nothing interesting happens no matter what the guy does? I feel like that's what happened with the Stanford Prison Experiment. The guy really wanted a riot or something and what he got was some people roleplaying.
Im a psych student who didn't really hear much about the stanford prison experiment since like, introductory high school AP almost 10 years ago (treated it like a significant study), so it was kinda news to me lol. The context surrounding the study might have been briefly covered in a stats class regarding ethics in research, now that I'm thinking back, but I defninitely didn't realize/remember how over-exaggerated it was, and I feel kinda embarassed about it. There are other examples in history social psychologists might reference to exemplify circumstances in which people lose their individuality and become violent and cruel.
With the amount of work Blair puts into not doing actual work, she could actually just DO the work. It's like me creating an elaborate fabric lasso to grab something across the room so I don't have to get up, only to knock a whole bunch of stuff over in the process.
Like many people in this comment section, I had a brief phase of binge-watching her channel (mostly the mlm stuff, while cooking dinner). But I remember quite clearly the moment I realized what a hypocrite she was. It was when she had a sponsorship for a credit/loan company. The whole thing sounded really predatory and not that different from all the shit she was "reporting" on. Also she was the only person (that I was watching at the time) that was sponsored by them. I can get behind the squarespace and hello fresh and whatever else but advertising to her viewers, telling them to take out a quick and easy loan with this super-simple and totally trustworthy online bank just felt hypocritical and against her supposed morals.
I got COVID in the summer of last year, ended up working from home for an extended time, and stumbled upon her MLM content while looking for longer, podcast-type content that could play in the background and where I could go from one to another without having to do too much searching. I can't remember what the exact moment was that did it for me, but I didn't stick around too long, and I remember that when she got away from MLMs and into taking on bigger corporations and social issues I started to get the feeling she was just lashing out at things for clicks. I don't recall catching her in any particularly sloppy factual errors or anything, it just started to feel kind of shallow and sensational? Which in retrospect, gawking at MLMs having a 'Super Platinum Double Executive Level' isn't particularly deep or anything, but it is entertaining and you don't need a while lot to prove MLMs are bad. ...and I also remember having really bad deja-vu after I stopped watching? I kept getting suggestions for her new video on whatever MLM was being covered, and going "I know she did a video on that, and not *that* long ago!" I didn't circle back to confirm, but that left me with the vibe that she was just recycling and repackaging her old videos for easy views and hoping people wouldn't notice in large enough numbers.
I know exactly what you mean. I started watching her videos for the MLM stuff. I can’t remember exactly what got me to unsubscribe but I remember watching some of her videos and being surprised at how many she could churn out so quickly. I started to wonder how it was possible if she was actually researching properly and I decided to switch off at that point.
@@hotpocketsat2am In what aspect, if I may ask for a tl;dr, i understandt they advertise themselves as "An echo friendly solution that prevents you from having to DRIVE to the store" but the one time I got hello fresh (a roomate ordered and a logistical error made his package free or smth so we shared) I remember it bringing SO MUCH EFFING PACKEGING, like, I can take the bus ride to the walmart or smth and not produce THESE MANY branded packages and bags, is it that?
as someone whose just spent hours and hours agonizingly looking for sources, putting together interviews, and organizing all of my research while for a final that isn’t going to get me any clout…… watching blair do what would immediately get her a failing grade in school and fumble herself to success is actually gut-wrenching
I feel you (I did not plagiarize this comment it is definitely original and mine alone) (I did not plagiarize this comment it is definitely original and mine alone)
Man… man in a second year biology lab (university) rn, I have to prepare 2 15min a presentations, for which you only know the topics 3 days before, while being in the lab/having class from 8 am to 7 pm… Still i read my sources (like a 5 page NATURE paper about your „Visualization of an endogenous retinoic acid gradient across embryonic development“ (title lol, and just one of many (read till like 00:30 before bed) fully before i take the beautiful picutres and graphs for my presentation, which i ofc cite correctly. And than seeing ppl like that just makes me sick, putting no effort their research and just puking it out there. Even while she reads it she doesnt understand, its just hollow
It's kind of amazing listening to her soullessly recounting the documentary wording about human suffering and lack of basic needs, like she didn't even care enough to put it in her own words 😭 it hurts my brain watching these clips back to back
What broke me is the section where she had her little persona crying and looking all sad as she says "While this person died, another trainer was injured before" in the most uninterested monotonous tone ever all the while getting the person's name wrong! If you told me this was either a comedy sketch or a Family Guy style cutaway I would genuinely believe you because it sounds like a setup/punchline to a joke!
This all gains new meaning when you realize how hard she went after her former friends. When the whole Sad Milk thing broke out, and she felt threatened by OzMedia(despite him, at the time, saying he's not gonna make a video of his own), first by sending him cease and desist and then threatening his home, because she manipulated him into an unfavorable housing situation way back when(which is it's own can of worms). Long story short, she can somehow forclose on the home. That forced Oz's hand and he made his response to that, and set up a go-fund me for legal fees and securing a new house. Blair or one of her flying monkeys, reported his go-fund me and had it suspended/deleted. I believe it got reinstated, but still...THIS WOMAN DID EVERYTHING IN HER POWER TO MAKE SURE SOMEONE WHO WAS THREATENING TO EXPOSE HER ENDED UP HOMELESS. again, she put MORE EFFORT into ruining her ex's life(whom she was misrtreating both emotionally and financially) than she does into her videos.
Oz's videos have been so illuminating (pun unintended) on this stuff, most likely because he was closest to her out of everyone. Worth a watch for anyone who's interested in what a POS she really is. I used to watch her stuff casually, not digging deep enough to notice the plagiarism or personal issues.
for ages it's been bothering me how so many youtubers could be writing words in their scripts that they don't know how to say or what they mean, and i realize now i've been listening to wayyyy more people reading off wikipedia and page 1 google results than i thought. thanks.
This implosion of video essays on youtube is kind of crazy, and it honestly checks out that tons of them are just copy/pasting or the video itselfis downright horrible and makes no real point. I started to notice it merely weeks ago, when I clicked on a few that were recomended and gave up on them after several minutes, a lot of them really are about nothing.
That definitely factors into it, though I wouldn't take it as a surefire sign that's it's plagiarism. People who learn words through books rather than hearing them often mispronounce specific words for years without realising. It's also pretty common for personality-based channels to have other people write or edit their scripts for them (but in the non-plagiarism way where they still do their own research and the writers get a writing credit).
It is very common to hear people pronounce 'mores' (as in social mores) as 'mores' (as in more of a quantity with an 's' on the end). I don't think this would have to do with plagiarism any more than any other reading, but now people hear each other say it on TH-cam and now its like the TH-cam pronunciation of the word
Thanks for bringing attention this, seriously. My wife is a former Jehovah’s Witness and knew something was wrong the instant she saw a cross get used in Blair’s video. They do NOT use the cross at all in that cult and it should’ve been extremely obvious with any amount of research.
Yeah one of first weird things JWs insist on is their belief that Jesus was nailed to a tree, not a cross, despite crux simplex being a thing and Romans really using X, T and I shapes crosses interchangeably so it wouldn't matter... Yet, this insistence on "IT WAS NOT A CROSS" is very extreme and a huge red flag it's actually a cult.
Oh my god yes, at the time, I was just slightly criticizing her because I was a fan and said that it was extremely "surface level information" but now that she's going to be gone forever and either die a McDonald's employee or die rotting in her sloppy house, I can finally say Blair's JW video was an extreme insult to someone who survived that insufferable cult.
mostly unrelated but i'm honestly so happy to see JW's be recognised for what they are; a cult. ofc no fault to the victims, i'm very happy your wife made it out, but it's ridiculous how normalised they are within western countries
To clarify as a psychology PhD student (finishing up roughly now, wooo) the quality of psychology content on TH-cam is so poor that Blair's mangling of the facts actually never raised a massive red flag for me. Almost all psych content on TH-cam is deeply and fundamentally wrong (or boring lecture content).
to be fair, "deeply and fundamentally wrong" is always true of psychology, given that the whole mess is made up of 10% badly intuited observations of strung out drug addicts and 90% completely made up BS.
I'm not even a psych expert, but fuck, the amount of ableism, especially against people with cluster b disorders in"""psychology""" videos is staggering. "Ten ways to see if your partner is a narcissist/has bpd/something" Did they ever realize that someone who has those conditions might be looking for reasources to help themselves and see a dozen videos spreading misinformation that presents them in the worst light possible. They are harming actual real life people ffs
Before all this broke, I noticed that she would frequently make pronunciation errors - specifically, confusing words that were spelled the same but had different meanings. I wondered how that kept happening if she wrote the scripts. Guess that's explained now.
I remember her saying that she's dyslexic and English isn't her first language, so I always assumed she had only ever seen those words written. I feel so silly for giving her the benefit of the doubt for so long
@@shani-just-shani Never feel bad for being kind. Just know that it's OK to temper your kindness with a little healthy skepticism. That is to say, if there's smoke it's generally prudent to at least check for a fire.
@@shani-just-shaniMan, never feel bad for giving people the benefit of the doubt. That's exactly one of the main problems of human society, in my opinion. People sometimes conflate this with being gullible. It's not being gullible, it's just accepting that there's always a chance someone knows better than you. After all, no matter the subject, there's always 8 billion of people out there to compete with, so it seems quite the chance you're gonna be wrong sometimes, and double checking before accepting any knowledge is true is never the wrong decision, even if that knowledge is your own.
Years before this I saw her back when she just read posts from Reddit which I don’t consider to be transformative by itself and it’s an easy way to make money off other people’s writing. I don’t care the legality of it-the ethics of it is that you make money off other people’s Reddit posts and prop yourself up to seem more important than you are to a certain community (anti MLM for example). I pointed this out and people told me I was reaching, but uh, hahahahahaha
It may be petty, but the constant misreads and mispronunciations were what made me stop watching iiluminaughtii videos. I never subscribed, but I'd been listening to her videos for background noise for a while, getting progressively more annoyed with her inability to read her own scripts right, but it wasn't SO bad that I felt the need to stop clicking on them entirely. Then she posted a channel update video where she said that she wanted to switch her videos to a more informal tone, and the rage I felt over her implying that her current sloppy, mispronounced videos were "too formal" drove me right over the edge to block her channel from my recommendations
I noticed the mispronunciations as well, and I remember her blaming it on her "Polish accent." Girl, even if Polish is your first language, you do not have a Polish accent
For me it was the fish video where it was just hilariously obvious she was just reading off a true crime wiki from the way the video was structured lmao.
what killed me about her was actually her filler commentary: "XXX company was found to do XXX: now, personally, i dont believe this is inherently bad: you do you. but i disagree with them when they aren't transparent about what they are doing". this exact same line is put almost after every quote.
A good tell that she plagiarizes stuff, she could've combined the statement and her opinion into one sentence, but it is much easier to interlace the plagiarized material with her commentary.
@@trainee5471 i think it was fairly obvious shes a content farm. It seemed like she picked a company at random and looked for company_name+boycott on google and just said everything that popped up. Its like those channels that run through entire movies scene by scene like cinema sins, which start with niche movies to talk about their opinion on them but then just make a video about every new movie that comes out.
I went to uni for a psychology degree (not in the US or any English speaking country) and we were told about the Standford experiment as if it was a real and legitimate study by my professors. They didn't go into a lot of detail about it, but it was treated as a Known Fact™. Misinformation always goes farther than people expect, and we as people tend to believe the first thing we hear about a topic, so correcting misinformation is always hard.
It's why "clickbait" is so rampant. Far too many people will ONLY read headlines and immediately assume whatever follows in the article is valid, and share it.
Information can travel slowly at times, get stuck in traffic. My psychology professor last semester actually said the Stanford Prison experiment was inaccurate, so I guess I'm lucky.@@TheSilverwing999
I have a Master's in Psychology in the US, and while we did learn about the Stanford Experiment, it was being taught to us not as a legitimate study in which anything was actually learned, but as a stain on the reputation of psychology. The only value the experiment has now is teaching us how important it is to maintain our strict ethical standards, because when we let them slip, people get hurt.
when the sad milk drama unfolded, she went on -twitter- *reddit* to complain about how the other members of the podcast, the "milkmen", weren't doing anything and were just lazy while she was having to do all the work, and made sure to say she was doing this on top of her main channel, colabs with other channels, her college degree, a soap business and three other businesses. so next time someone brags about being a workoholic who just does an unreasonable amount of work in order to try and make themselves look better than someone else, check how much of their work is actually theirs.
She also signed over her own debts onto people she dated, without them knowing. That is so f**ked (among other things she's guilty of.) She's a manipulator in every respect.
i stopped watching blair the moment she started defending her choice to buy her dog from a puppy mill, and when she started making herself out to be the victim in that situation. the feeling of schadenfreude i get from watching her fall like this is incredible honestly
Especially when she made a video condemning people who got dogs from puppy mills. I don’t know why she’s apparently the only one, according to her that’s above the rules and laws of society. The level of hypocrisy with her is both hilarious and astounding.
To be kinda fair, she presented that video as a "I didn't know, this happened to me, don't do what I did, here's why." I think that's somewhat admirable. However I do wonder now how much of the non personal stuff was plagiarized.
@@AdaptiveReasoningi’ve heard that she had been warned and given advice on the red flags and how to avoid falling for a puppy mill, but disregarded the tips since “she could do her own research” i do know for sure and want to mention, tho, that while being recommended adopting, she claimed that she wanted a pure-bred puppy because she had unspecified allergies and she wanted a dog that she “knew she could care for”, and that would make a samoyed the best fit for her.. despite the fact that she’s known to be a notoriously untidy and unhygienic person, while samoyeds need very regular grooming, shed a ton, and - yknow - there’s no breed that’s actually, fully “hypoallergenic”
The only way to not support a animal mill is to literally not support them & actively campaign against them. If she really gave a sh^t about 'Rescuing animals from breeding mills', she would either try to buyout the mill or report it for animal cruelty. Never liked her. Tbh, 1st I've ever heard of her. I think I may have even been linked to her Vaccine Video FROM HBombGuy! 🤣🤌 Crazy!
@@clown-cat I mean, she didn't lie, then. She did her own research! And going by her videos, this means she did a single Google search for "Is a Puppy Mill?" and when the top result didn't immediately declare it a puppy mill, that was clearly proof positive it wasn't a puppy mill and Blair is clear of all wrong-doing! /s
Around the time of the Legal Eagle drama, I heard this story from some years ago about Blair and this advocacy group that was trying to take down a very predatory MLM. One of Blair's "researchers" tried to join their Facebook group, but the advocates repeatedly rejected them because Blair was already pretty infamous among anti-MLM circles for being a plagiarist and also because their work was very sensitive due to the MLM being extremely litigious. However, a mod who wasn't in the loop let the guy in and predictably Blair proceeded to steal all their hard work for a video on the MLM, with the advocacy group only receiving a link to them tossed into a pastebin document with all the other sources she ripped off.
Hey, I wasn't expecting her horrible Vocaloid video to get mentioned here! I was one of the people who wrote the big doc on that, and my co-writer ended up getting blocked by Blair and her producer on Twitter and was told she wasn't "relevant enough to bother contacting for information" as if we even asked LMFAO. We thought at the time the video was just poorly researched (it was) and fucking linked Amino of all places as a source, but yesterday someone else on Twitter discovered she'd even plagiarised part of that video from an old article too. 😭😭
Linking amino??? As someone who used amino during my vocaloid phase (2014-ish), you should not find facts from there! Most of the people there qre between 10 and 15
@@taureon_ it was a bizarre time. One editor on the SH fan wiki added a section to the SH4 page about how the game was full of metaphor and symbolism about the trauma of male circumcision. An edit war resulted and it got stranger. I was into SH at the time, so I saw the changed pages, but didn't get to find out what happened behind the scenes until much later.
That mention of Blair's SeaWorld video was a nice surprise. She's made 5 videos about the amusement industry so far and all of them are riddles with plagiarism and misinformation. I've been researching more into her video about Nara Dreamland and found out that she not only ripped Defunctland's video on the park, but also used it directly in her own video as footage without any mention of it (although ironically you can see Kevin's original source blurb in the bottom right [about 4 minutes in if anyone was curious])
Oh jeez, that's horrible... Kevin from Defunctland cares so passionately about his subject, and it takes him months to research and put his videos together. I really hate that there are so many 'bad' creators who drown out the good ones.
She was pushing in one that amusement rides were never going to be safe without Federal regulations the channel @coastercollege debunked that by the simple fact most Rides are bolted to the ground as permanent installs there never crossing the state lines and entering Federal jurisdiction and most states have intense safety inspections in my state PA the Amusment rides are inspected by a division of the Department of AG and they have a report line . th-cam.com/video/1NfBedCHBGI/w-d-xo.html she posted a new one after her non apology but her Action Park video also harps on ride safety paranoia. th-cam.com/video/mF6vyRFpywo/w-d-xo.html
@@jack-a-lopium Though also incredibly stupid, why the fuck would plagiarize the single biggest amusement park TH-camr on TH-cam. Like Defunctland is huge and gets millions of views how the fuck did she think she was gonna get away with plagiarizing him on the same platform.
I just keep making myself laugh thinking about a major motion picture film ending, fading to black, and then a pastebin link slowly rises up into frame.
The thing that always bugged me about her videos is that they were always really strangely paced, and they didn't seem to be written with a particular point in mind. So they would just kinda end in really unsatisfying ways, which is why I eventually stopped watching her videos entirely. But now it kinda makes sense why her videos are like that, cause she doesn't write anything, so her videos end when she runs out of material to plagiarise, and she can't be bothered to write an actual conclusion.
I noticed that after a while. Her earlier long-form content seemed to be better, but as time went on, I noticed that her videos were often just surface-level overviews of topics without a strong argument or point.
The last like ... half a year of her videos before the full meltdown and can opening of the situation so many videos felt like they were only half done. There was no point, no genuine commentary, it was as if she presented the situation and then went "that's kind of weird, don't you think?" with two or three sponsorships stapled on
I used to grade essays and papers for English 110 and English 200 classes, classes typically taken by college freshmen. After that, I developed an intolerance for what I call "fake writing". "Fake writing" is writing fluff to fill a page limit, or paraphrasing the first result on google to fill a page limit. Freshman do this all the time. Illuminauti is 95% filler. She expresses no genuine opinion or perspective in her videos. She just summarizes the first result on google. You may as well be reading AI generated ad-columns or the filler text on a recipe page. It's brain rot.
I mean it sounds like her videos are stitched together, but with no heart. And I do think despite the fact that she was masquerading as an intelligent person by stealing their work, she's actually an idiot and that shines through
I forgot what video it was but I got suspicious when instead of the ACTUAL cover art for Akira she used a gender-bent softcore nsfw version of it instead completely seriously 🤣 Its amazing how she consistently manages to mess up so bad
I remember the Heaven's Gate episode, and she kept pronouncing Do's name like dew instead of doe. Their whole thing with their nicknames was that they were the musical scales. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do.
@ObnoxiousGOOSE perhaps, if you are further into music theory than the average person, or Italian. "So" as in "So! A needle pulling thread" a play on the word "sew" and "Ti" as in "Ti! I drink with jam and bread" as in "tea" a warm beverage. As this was in reference to the Heaven's Gate leaders who went by Do and Ti, they would prefer the common version.
Sounds like something done on purpose to bait people into commenting key words & boosting the video. Sounds cynical but it's one of THE top most recommended tricks among these content mill creators. Like, every article will tell new creators to do this for engagement. It's hell.
i've hated blair's sloppy work for 2 years, since im pretty knoweldgable on religious abuse and her video touching nrms/cults and mlms are horribly constructed, get facts wrong, and most of all a thing ive seen no one talk about: exploitative. She made sensationalized thumbnails with faces of real children that were really abused by a cult, to get clicks. and that is so abbhorent i dont have words
I started watching her for mlm information because she cited her sources and when I'd fact checked the information it had come back as verifiable. And then a cult video autoplayed because I had to get a new phone. Immediately different- i noticed red flags and errors immediately. She'd chosen some good sources to steal from like well-produced documentaries for mlms (which i had known very little about). But once the Legal Eagle nonsense happened i immediately knew something was wrong - i searched for other videos about this situation. I recall being horrified at hearing how she stole private posts from communities that were recovering from MLMs. The lack of empathy is only one thing - she chooses greed. She's literally a pyramid, it's disgusting that she believes her paycheck means consent or basic journalistic integrity doesn't matter.
Her videos about cults are why I stopped watching her. She couldn't be bothered to get basic things right, like claiming that the Jehovah's Witnesses believe in Hell. Not to mention that she is CONSTANTLY mispronouncing things.
@vivalarazausarmyvet4453 Not a single person who's actually on "the far right" gives a shit about her. Which you would know if you actually knew anything about what they believe. Pro tip, deciding what someone believes based on what people who hate them claim, is *really* dumb.
What I find the hardest to understand with this whole situation is the lack of passion. Every essay I’ve had to write for school, even if I hated the topic, I’ve managed to finagle some piece or angle I’m passionate about into it. The few essays I’ve only passingly been able to connect some passion into I absolutely hated writing. I just don’t understand how Blair can churn out all these essays (plagiarized or not) when she clearly has no passion for any of the topic, so much so she gets basic pronunciations wrong. Sure money is a factor, but I can’t imagine making 3 videos a week about something I don’t care about.
A lot/most people spend most of their lives on jobs they don’t care about. I think the incentive for Blair isn’t to spend her work-time doing something she enjoys, but to make as much as she can with the least effort to maximize time she doesn’t have to work. I hope that sentence makes sense lol
@@VultureSkins It does, it’s just that we’re not talking about accounting or retail work, this is her own directed art, there is nobody bearing down on her to make crap
I feel like it's important to bring up that Illuminaughtii spent years on failed TH-cam channels that never developed a following before the video essay thing and Sad Milk took off. Your essays for school might have been filled with passion like Blaire's early stuff was, but you got a guarantee that someone would read your essay and give you a grade, Blaire didn't have that guarantee. So, imagine if you were in school and it was suggested that you could write an essay on anything you wanted, or not write an essay at all, but if you wrote an essay you could put it in a hat and maybe your teacher would pick up that essay, read it, and grade it. You might have written 2 essays, or 20 essays, or just 1 essay, and managed to finagle some piece or angle you're passionate about into it, but how would you feel looking into that hat day after day seeing whatever you wrote just sit there. You'd either have to go hard into the "Well, at least I'm happy about it," mindset or you'd probably get pretty bitter about it, or you'd be really numb and apathetic towards it. Then, imagine one day as a joke you write an essay like "Spongebob Squarepants: Secret Serial Killer," and THAT'S the essay that gets noticed and gets graded. After all of the work you put into every other essay you made, the only one that ever got noticed was the garbage you created in five minutes that was mostly sourced from a creepypasta you stumbled upon. I imagine if that happened to you, but it was a video essay that made you thousands of dollars, your mindset would probably change pretty drastically.
This is probably the best iilluminaughtii related video I’ve ever seen. Everyone else is focusing on how she’s a shitty boss, friend, and overall human being- which is for sure important, but everyone takes for granted that her videos were popular and well liked. This is the first person I’ve seen that acknowledges that she runs a content farm. Alongside her shitty candles, crypto farm, and attempts at making a company town, her main channel is just another soulless money grab. However, since she did have a team of writers/editors i am still curious if it was her doing the plagiarizing herself or if she just instructed others to do it. I’m not sure which is worse. Edit: for clarity’s sake, when I say “company town” I’m being a bit tongue in cheek, since what she was allegedly doing wasn’t exactly like a company town, but it was close enough that people would understand what I’m getting at and she has a history of videos talking about why company towns are horrible so it’s a bit two faced to turn around and pull this. Check out Wonder and Ozmedia’s video responses to hear the whole of the allegations. The short of it, from what I understand, is that iiluminaughtii was trying to be a landlord for various friends/employees/coworkers. She wanted complete financial control over her inner circle, and perhaps even other employees since in her discord she would fantasize about buying everyone BMWs. So not exactly a company town, but the end result is the same- a cycle of financial abuse. Take this with a grain of salt, since literally every allegation against Illuminaughtii is a ‘he said she said’.
People who worked for Illuminaughtti have stated that she's very hands-off, and that she doesn't even know what's going on with her own channel most of the time. Apparently, the team changed the outro, and Blair didn't notice for several videos. I would imagine that Blair just hired shitty writers, since she has no idea how to do research or what good research is. Most of her team aren't good people either. They were the ones that invaded communities of MLM survivors to steal research without crediting them.
she created videos with the same energy that I did when I wrote essays and made presentations in middle school when the project was due in 2 days, same energy but less actual research.
Right, like as I was watching this I was genuinely thinking about how my essays in high school (and even some early in college) were easily ~30% quotes by volume because I am a serial procrastinator and usually wrote all my essays the day before or even the day they were due, but even then I went through the extra effort to do my own research and tried to gain an understanding of what I was writing. From what I can tell, Blaire literally just opens up her recording software and sightreads documentary transcripts for an hour.
This ties in well with the Folding Ideas video on the Mikkelsen twins: he tries to write a 50k word nonfiction book in a month, and points out that synthesis research takes by far the most time, so you're going to be cutting corners like it's crunch time at the circle factory (that's a Zero Punctuation joke. I'm no plagiarist). Quoting is by far the least effort, so he realizes he should do as much of it as possible (the limit set by the method is 15% though). He points out that writing at this pace, on topics you're unfamiliar with, can only ever produce meaningless garbage. 2000 words per day is just too much to do any real research. So Blair saying "I write 3 4k words videos a week" makes sense. It's the same kind of pace, so the only way to not end up with boring, repetitive drivel is to either only write about stuff you're already an expert on (and I suspect anyone will quickly run out of things to say at 12000 words a week), or to rely on the writing of other people. The worst thing is that _that_ video came out just before ChatGPT launched. The method he described required hiring a cheap gig economy ghost writing service to actually write the book for you for a too low price, but within a few months of that video releasing it became much faster, easier and cheaper to produce vacuous spam like that. The same goes for the illuminaughties of the world. This type of plagiarism is now even less work than it was, while also being more difficult to detect!
I write as a huge part of my job and 4k words is about the max I can do in an 8 hour day. if I also had to record and edit a video on top of that, AND do it all 3 times a week I would be working 6 or 7 days a week for my entire life
point of order - blair has a TEAM of writers. she has a TEAM of researchers. and this doesn't absolve her of the relentless plagiarism and lies she slaps onto youtube with her stupid cartoon character; on the contrary, it makes it worse. the fact that her output is so consistently shitty despite having multiple people working on it indicates exactly what hbomb said in his primary video about plagiarism - blair does not give a FUCK about what she's talking about. the amount of thought and effort you put into this comment is more than what blair puts into any of her videos.
This presumes that someone using ChatGPT to produce 4k word content every couple days as fast and cheap as possible is going to be able to either correct the content that ChatGPT disgorges (unlikely to even try), or to not be IMMEDIATELY noticed when she reads off ChatGPT completely fabricating content again. On top of the issues of the words it says making basic grammatic sense or flowing well, ChatGPT has no idea what is real, it just knows how to phrase something in a way that makes things sound plausible. This slams face-first into a wall the instant you show this to anyone who has even the *slightest* bit of knowledge about the actual subject matter. (See the Legal Eagle, appropriately enough, on that time a lawyer tried to use ChatGPT to make up case law to cite, didn't bother to check if it was real, and was immediately caught when the opposing lawyers and judge tried to look this mystery case law up and found it did not exist because OF COURSE THEY WOULD LOOK. I've also seen this personally in RPG forums - people try to do things like create monsters or characters for tabletop games like Pathfinder 1e, insert a prompt that includes a line banning content from D&D 5e, and then they post it, and everyone immediately points out that all the content is for 5e, because that's what ChatGPT was trained consuming content from.) If you look at a lot of criticisms Blair has been getting from fans, it's been about factual inaccuracy about subjects they care about. Wikipedia may be *boring,* but at least it has a functional fact-check by all the people who use it, since errors are easily corrected which makes copy-pasting from it at least *safer* from a lazy writer's standpoint. Even if you dump the whole Wikipedia passage into ChatGPT, there's still no guarantee it won't do "AI" magic to throw weird nonsense into the script the way it keeps inventing or deleting fingers with photo editing, and of course anyone pulling this trick isn't going to take the time to check. And yeah, she's totally wrong about stuff all the time, and people call her out a lot, but the important part is that it has to be only a SMALL portion of the audience who knows (and those who scroll down far enough in the comments to get to the frequently-downvoted corrections while ignoring the comments that always float to the top that are just "I love you, TH-camr!") If you get to the point where you're reading off things that are wrong from a "basic English sentence structure" level (and refusing to ever do a second take after noticing while recording), people will start rejecting the content outright en masse.
Try to imagine what a typical work week must’ve looked like when she was in her prime. She probably picked topics at the beginning of the week. She spent one day (at most) doing some light googling or watching a documentary and copy-pasting sections from webpages into a word document. The next day she sat in front of a microphone and read it all in one take. Sent it to the editing team. Maybe she reviewed the next upload or talked to her staff. Then she spent a few hours picking fights on Twitter. Rinse and repeat three times a week. What a weird life. EDIT: it appears I expected too much. Looks like Blair *maybe* picked the topics and *at best* received a list of links/sources from her researcher which she then stitched together into a script and did not consistently watch her own videos to review for quality. It's entirely possible that the only work she did on a regular basis was reading the script. Take most of the work I imagined and replace it with picking fights on twitter.
I know she had at least one researcher on staff. I suspect what happens is that her researcher sends her the links and she knits a script from the sources. I don't even think she does the cursory googling and raiding of wikipedia.
@@TheCandystripedlegs paying a researcher to send you a link to Wikipedia because you can't be bothered to Google it is next-level laziness. I'm impressed
Someone could unironically just clone her voice with AI and make this garbage and it would be identical to everything she's actually put out, it's insane
I mean tbh I have a feeling she'll do that herself. She just turns out garbage for adsense. I'm sure she's looked into AI automating basically everything for her.
if im being honest her voice sounds like the most generic, slightly raspy and fluid American voice that I have ever heard, definitely feels a little like ai already, cloning her voice wouldn't be hard for AI lol
what is so crazy to me is not even reading the whole wiki article for the stanford prison experiment… when i pretend to know about stuff, the criticisms and controversies sections are the first i go to. like give me the drama girl. Lazy Man’s Curiosity. i literally citation chased like this back when i was in high school to annoyingly correct my psych teacher. but she couldn’t even be bothered to do that! damn. indicative 😔
One of the things I've noticed from watching iiluminaughtii videos is that she tends to be terrible at coming to obvious conclusions and deducing. She sometimes relies on being perplexed instead of putting forth viable theories based on the information she has in front of her. I always found it slightly annoying. After her plagiarism was noticed and uncovered, it reframes it for me that because she lifted so much of her material, that she doesn't actually know much about the subjects she presents and therefore can't even begin to offer any original thoughts.
This. Or when diving into topics that require knowledge of another foundational topic/science, she'd just mention some keyword and go "haha idk what that is, I didn't check"... Ma'am, we're aware.
It wouldn't work as well. She has nothing unique to say so the conclusions she could offer would be boring, and non engaging. "ISNT IT CRAZY HOW ALL THAT FYRE FESTIVAL STUFF HAPPENED" gets you more comments than "People scam and that's normal and this was a bigger scam than usally that had lot more publicity to it than most scams" I think part of the appeal her inability to give any insight ot conclusion gives the audience freedom to project their own interpretation onto it. Even more than on the original work she copied
@@Jo.j.13-l9v Your point is that plagiarizers, or at least iiluminaughtii, are more successful in leaving essays open-ended because they're wholely clueless about the subject matter than the people they stole the information from?
@manwright8679 His point seemed to me to be that an ignorant person presents information in a way that the fellow ignorant kind of prefer. Probably not consciously, but the limp, conclusion-less delivery is non-threatening to whatever opinions or impressions the ignorant audience has thought of. I would add the broader stroke that Blair's obvious weakness on the subject keeps any insecure people from feeling stupid next to her.
@@MoonShadowWolfe yeah, uh ...I don't like that precedent. It's dangerously close to "plagiarizers are good, actually." That's why I was asking them to clarify.
The degree to which she's used Wikipedia provides a really satisfying irony to the rant she went on on the Welsh Brothers podcast years ago. She was smugly mocking Cruel World Happy Mind, a much smaller anti MLM youtuber who was just starting out at the time, claiming she only cited like 4 sources for her video and the top one was Wikipedia. Then she continued by comparatively bragging how superior she was for regularly citing 20-40 sources in attachments to her videos. And, of course, that whole issue started because Cruel World was alerted by a "friend" that it seemed iilluminaughtii had copied one of her recent videos, so she wrote Blair a very respectful message asking to discuss the issue. The message seemed to go ignored and forgotten for months until that podcast came out.
This is a very minor point, but I love how the intro music for Blair's first "Silent Hill/Centralia" vid uses music from the show "Goosebumps". Definitely adds to her vibe of putting as little effort as possible lol.
It was tripping me up, because MandaloreGaming uses the same music as the intro to his videos, and for a second I thought she was ripping him off, too.
As an ex Iilluminaughtii viewer, I watched her videos for the whole "exposing bad people" thing she did, as did many others. She couldn't have chosen a worse audience for when all this came to light, considering she spent so long telling people to never respect people who do such things. She carefully crafted her own demise to the point that it's actually impressive
She also actively risked ruining a huge case against a large MLM company and risked setting up former members of the company to be retaliated against. She really took off by making anti-MLM videos (a subgenre that has a whole community and activism around it) and then when she was accused of copying a smaller TH-camr's video she claimed she didn't even know there was a community and said she didn't consider herself a part of it and didn't want to be a part of it. This obviously pissed people off as she was the most prominent voice voice in anti-MLM content and there were various examples of this being an obvious lie. So there was a private Facebook group for former members of a big MLM company run by a few other anti-MLM TH-camrs that were organing videos and helping in the lawsuit going on. People on there were sharing their experiences and stories with the expectation that it was a private space. She sent one of her staff to join the Facebook group. The group said sorry we don't want anything to do with Blair and reject the request to join. They tried to join AGAIN and a mod who didn't know about the situation let them in and by the time the other mods noticed they had already gotten all the info from the group. The person in charge of group then reached out to Blair and asked her not to use the info and stories she'd gotten from the group in a video because of the lawsuit and that the company had been retaliating against people speaking out but she used the info anyway.
That's pretty messed up, god I wonder how she hasn't been deplatformed yet. Yet I'm not surprised since people like Shane Dawson and James Charles and Colleen are still on the platform so... Anyway what video was this in if you don't mind me asking?
@@Randomaccountiswear I don't remember the name but I remember someone from the group talking about her experience around it. You can look her up if you'd like, her name is Savannah Marie and she talked about it with cruel world happy mind
This is kinda the thing that.. disturbs me a bit. Because she kinda did, no? If she flew a bit more under the radar and weren't an egomaniac, maybe Harris wouldn't have brought her up at all. This should be taken as a lesson applied to every single creator out there, atleast to me
@@siera2470yeah i only heard people talk about the plagiarism after she got into controversy for other unrelated things and then people starting to speak up about that too
honestly at this stage Hbomb is my gold standard for youtube essayists who discuss factual, research-able information. Provides examples, cites all his sources, *provides the sources* so you know he's not bullshitting you. every video is like a well-written research paper
It's simple, there's no passion. Her channel is clearly in a good state in which she makes money of, but she needs *more*. It's all greed. It's all for profit.
@@lyndsay80 to be fair, I don't think she cares about her channel past it's ability to make her money. A youtuber- vangelinaskov I think- interviewed an employee of her's and she mentioned that she only noticed a change in her outro like 3 months after. It's actually just passionless money slop
@@kb4106the way she phrases it like she HAS to make thee videos for her viewers and i quote “for you guys” implies her ego is caught up in it and she’s soooo obligated to do so - there’s a layer of guilt tripping there
@@tlowery2074 yeah. I could see how she could be almost completely uninvolved and still be super egotistical about it. Sorry if my comment was rude- I struggle to understand people sometimes lol
her vocaloid video is what made me do a double take with her, but it was her response that cemented it. the vocaloid community reached out in good faith, and she attacked the people trying to spread their passion for this software. it was pretty bad
One thing, as a part time revisor for university student's papers, that I noticed that really gives away if someone is plagiarizing someone else is to pay attention to the adjectives and when and how they are used throughout the length of the production. Adjectives is the point where the author's opinions clearly leak through, even if they are trying to suppress it. If the usage seems inconsistent or a bit awkward, it's a strong indicator that it was plagiarized
although depending on your age/skill level/investment in the particular assignment etc you also might just be looking up various words in a thesaurus to pad word count lol...
@@cpsbBXCX I see what you did there. We have a inside joke that Dennis Prager loves trans women because he talks about us so much in a way of obsession. Dennis poses himself as an authority but in the end he's a self-help book author and radio host. He has charisma I give that, but the gaslighting and bluster seem to only work on the 'working class people' with poor education.
@@CormanToth Not the point. The point is that this sort of plagiaristic behavior is treated far more seriously by entities like universities than how TH-cam treats it.
I could never get over how often she badly misread quotes or mispronounced important words, but now I realise it’s because she doesn’t care about the subjects and probably didn’t even write them herself
In fact, she posted a video about Crumlin Road Gaol which she referred to for the whole video as “Gale” (not Crumlin Road Gail, just gale), and when everyone pointed out her mistake in the comments, she took down the video and announced it on Twitter like she was handing down punishment
A funny thing is the part of these clips I hate the most are the only bits that actually coming from Illuminaughtii herself, which is the lil adlibs when she says something sassy and acts like she's 'spilling the tea.' The "which, you know, is fucking ridiculous" and "listen, I hate Autism Speaks" rub me the wrong way so bad. They're such surface level statements said with so little authenticity behind them. It reminds me of react videos where a guy sits silently for 5 minutes and then says "dammnn, he showed them" or "woah, what was that?" in a monotone voice as if that commentary adds anything.
And the fact that they’re completely empty. They’re glorified Barnum statements that can be applied to ANY topic she speaks about to give the illusion of actually caring.
The weird thing is that there were a few times that I saw Iilluminaughtii videos about stuff I already knew about, and everytime this happened, I was disappointed because there was a lot of "oversimplified" and "misunderstood" subject matter. And then I still never took the time to look into the other ones.
same! i originally subbed back in the day for the MLM videos, but unsubbed as i watched videos of subjects i was well-versed on, and could clearly see the messy research and unfamiliarity with the topics.
It's like someone gave her a list of bullet point arguments on a topic she has no fundamental understanding of. There's one video she made on a particular organization that I used to belong to, and while she did come to the conclusion that their practices are problematic, she only focused on minor sensationalist issues.
@@kaemincha yeah when she started producing non MLM content (or plagarising) is when i realized she didn't know anything and was a crappy researcher. amusingly she clearly does everything that she accused Cruel World Happy Mind of. which a lot of people were theorizing would be the case after the legal eagle drama.
Here's the backstory for anyone who wants to know about why the Vocaloid (and wider vocal synth) community hates her. I was on Twitter that fateful day. One of my mutuals wrote a huge Google doc correcting her, and after your original video released, I ended up finding an article she plagiarized for the Vocaloid video.
As mentioned before, she made a video about Vocaloid in 2021. It was riddled with basic factual errors, and actually what caused myself and many others to stop liking her and start analyzing her content more critically. She actually had a fit and yelled at a bunch of Vocaloid fans for trying to issue corrections. Here's the list of errors she made that I could spot, if anyone is interested.
- Stated that Miku is canonically always 16. Miku's age is for marketing purposes and her publisher has stated her age is meant to be fluid and she can be a jaded 87 year old if you want, along with literally everything else. Crypton says Eldritch Horror Miku is canon compliant, everyone!
- Failing to cite song lyrics for the song "Miku" by Anamanaguchi. Literally just reads them out without context.
- Blair forgets how Japanese name order works at several points in the video and uses character's family names as their first names, and people's first names as last names.
- Throughout the video, Blair implies that the Vocaloid software is only used by EDM musicians. This is untrue. Not quite a factual error per se, but still an incredibly dumb error to make because it could be dispelled with even 5 minutes on TH-cam. There's a particularly large metal scene in the Vocaloid community, for example.
- Mispronounces the name of "Kenshi Yonezu" as "Kenshi Tansu" for some reason
- Cites a fake news article announcing the creation of a Hatsune Miku anime
- Cites UTAU as being a commercial-ish competitor to Vocaloid when it's really more the Audacity to Vocaloid's Adobe Audition and is community-driven by the creation of free and open-source voice libraries
- Cites LUCIA and LUAN (a pair of Spanish voicebanks for Vocaloid5) as being created shortly after Miku's creation by a new creator named Giuseppe. LUCIA and LUAN were created by an employee of the company that Yamaha partnered with for Vocaloid's development affairs (VoctroLabs). They were also announced about 10-ish years after Miku's release. She cites another Spanish Vocaloid, Clara as being from a competing company when in fact she was a Vocaloid3 release by VoctroLabs. They also were cancelled midway through production and never released.
- Cites that the two first Vocaloids ever created, Leon and Lola, are commonly depicted as white by the fandom despite being voiced by Black singers. While this is TRUE, she leaves out that *they were portrayed by white stock photo models on the boxart by Yamaha and Zero-G (their publisher), and Zero-G did not confirm they were voiced by Black singers until over a decade later,* failing to acknowledge the hand the two companies had in the whitewashing of these vocalists by the Fandom. As old fans have become the people making commercial vocal synths, it is now considered an industry standard to portray characters as being the same race as their voice providers.
- She cited the story of a Korean producer named SeeU being harassed out of the Japanese Vocaloid community. SeeU was not a producer. SeeU was a voicebank for the Vocaloid3 software, capable of singing in Japanese and Korean, with plans for English support. She never received any updates due to a mix of anti-Korean bigotry in Japan, financial troubles with her publisher, and her voice provider (Kim Dahee of the kpop group GLAM) having legal troubles.
- Misattributes the late Wowaka's record label as "ballroom" when his record label was actually "baloom"
- Uses a Google translated title of one of Wowaka's songs as "Front and Back Lovers" when the official translation is "Two-sided Lovers" or "Two-faced Lovers"
- Cites a *FANDOM WIKI BLOG POST* asking people to credit Vocaloid producers instead of the Vocaloids themselves as the idea of crediting producers being a new-in-2021 idea, when in reality it has been considered standard crediting practice since the early 2010s that one should cite the producer, as saying a song is by Miku is like saying a song is by Piano or Drum machine.
- Cites VTubers as being an evolution of the Vocaloid software. I should not need to tell you why this is incorrect.
I'm dying😂. This woman doesn't investigate and research the topics she talks about in her videos at all.
Thanks for the summary! I was big into vocaloid around ten years ago (I still listen to it, I'm just not involved in the fandom anymore) and I would have been so pissed if I saw her video. It's almost impressive much how basic info she gets wrong.
Damn I really just read all that with next to no knowledge of Vocaloid(besides the well known stuff). Cool.
It was hilarious to me watching her video and then Shadok's LOVEWEB about vocaloid because it's like. The difference in research and just overall video quality is drastic lol
what do you mean you stopped liking her? she is literally a western feminist. how could you like a person with such non redeemable qualities?
Since this video came out, Blaire uploaded a video titled "The Dark Side of Disaster Relief" where she just straight up forgot to put her voiceover in the video, so there's a solid 5-minute chunk about 13 and a half minutes in that's just the spooky backing music and her PNGTuber avatar gesticulating in silence.
HBomb made a tweet pointing this out when it was uploaded 5 months ago. That video is still up, and the section with no voiceover is still there, despite TH-cam having given creators the tools _years_ ago to replace audio tracks.
In case you were wondering _just how lazy_ she could be, now you've got a pretty good answer.
She must be too busy suing everyone she's ever worked with to care about her channel anymore
Jesus Christ 🤦♀️
I believe the Patreon cut of that video fixed the voiceover error. I forget where it was that I heard this from though, and I sure as hell am not giving Blair any money to confirm if this is true or not.
A video about disasters that is itself a disaster
i always noticed soooo many mistakes in her videos! like the voiceover not matching the words onscreen, mispronounced words, bad grammar, sentences that don't make sense etc. audio proofreading is my side hustle so i notice a couple of those types of errors in basically every video i watch, but illuminaughti seemed to have a lot more errors than others. i tried to give the benefit of the doubt, thinking she is just a small creator who maybe can't afford a proofreader... but honestly, proofing costs like 25 to 30 dollars/hr. it takes maybe an hour and a half to proof an hour long voiceover, depending on how many errors are in it. her videos are not that long... she could probably afford it. i stopped watching her videos bc i just assumed that there were factual errors in them too, looks like i was right lmao
Everyone's an Illuminaughtii fan until she makes a video about something you actually know about.
Oh, hello blair, keep being a pos @king-of-swing
The Elon musk of video essays
You’re absolutely spot on. Her video on vaccines, where she completely mangled how a vaccine works all while acting like she knew exactly what she was talking about, was the very last video of hers I watched.
Like cinema sins
Honestly, no. I knew she did MLM and she does exactly the kind of anti-capitalist topics I love listening about. Her videos got recommended to me a few years ago when I started watching CruelWorldHappyMind’s videos. But her tone was so boring and lifeless I just couldn’t finish a video. Even in a background of doing something it was too uncomfortable. And now I know why 😂
She just read someone else’s words in a monotonous voice and didn’t even care about the topic
I love the little circumcision inside joke about Silent Hill. For anyone who didn't get that, an admin on the SH Wiki kept claiming Walter Sullivan, the villain from Silent Hill The Room, was evil because he'd been circumcised as a child and that circumcision is Satanic or something like that. It was totally insane, even the developers had to tell him he was wrong if I remember correctly and he still insisted he was right.
Thanks you.
The Ongoing Silent Hill Wiki Circumcision War is the funniest internet drama I've ever seen
i got it! and i laughed audibly :)
@@TannerOfTheNorthHe's still doing it?
Worth mentioning that this is also pretty antisemitic if you keep in mind that sans the weird American habit of having it done circumcision is historically a Jewish custom
Around 4:01 she says “Trust me, I hate Autism Speaks. Like, FUCK Autism Speaks.” I agree with that statement but this woman has no actual convictions, she’s just parroting the opinion she believes is popular amongst her viewers. It’s so cynical it turns my stomach.
Yes, I started to get the feeling from her after a while that her moral outrage was performative. Boy, was I right!
right? and it's emphasized by her stupid little cartoon person somehow overacting as a two dimensional triangle.
As an autistic person that used to be part of her audience when I was younger, the performativity is actually pissing me off. Just, yikes.
@@sweetsour4375 Same. Autistic person who hates Autism Speaks. I genuinely thought she was an ally for a while. I feel so used...
@@Cyberweasel89 Don't feel bad for being duped by a con artist; they should be the ones ashamed of themselves, not you. The world needs more allies and she sadly took advantage of that.
man appeared out of nowhere, took no prisoners, gave no fucks and did elaborate. former Iilluminaughti fan here, massive props
oh, if you want more, watch the videos from the click, onetopic etc etc. about her.... its an interesting rabbit hole
@@therobbersdaughter2700it’s a clusterfuck yeah
@@stllr_ ok that would make more sense. I was hella confused cause this channel only has speed runs from 4 yrs ago!
Use to watch her but then she had a Lomi paid promotion and that sent of red flags. Not only did she shill snake oil but made it sound like she uses one when she doesn't
@@elizabethanncook1199 This is an accompanying vid to his most recent "Plagiarism and You(Tube)". It's even better.
My skin crawls when she says "bla bla bla... when I'm making three videos a week _for you guys..."_ as if she does this plagiaristic content mill bullshit for anyone but herself.
She's just so nice and so generous and we should be so grateful for all the hard work she does out of the goodness of her triangular heart
ANY time a creator says they do or want to do something profitable "for you guys" it is the biggest red flag.
so many creators do that and its so annoying, where they deflect criticism of the quality of their content by pretending they have a boss who demands a certain crazy output when really they made the decision to commit to three videos a week or 8 hours of streaming a day or whatever it is.
I think that’s also a Trojan horse for the unspoken ambition of trying to shortcut your way to a full time YT career. They want the popularity of the Nebula backed creators but need to generate enough attention so they double down on algorithm boosting tactics like ultra frequent uploads.
One I actually kind of respect is Kaylasays who’s more of an editorial vlogger than a video essayist. Despite being classifiable as an amateur entertainment journalist, she has a Masters in journalism, works as a journalist as her day job, and makes a point of either not saying anything she can’t concretely back up/verify and makes it very clear when she has to go a bit more speculative along with providing additional reasons her version could be wrong.
@@vlad5042They're doing corporate "we have to increase productivity otherwise profits will be down next quarter" tactics but because it's TH-cam they get to frame themselves as the little guy who's being oppressed.
I remember watching her video about puppy farms since she bought her dog from one. At one point she talked about how much research she put into getting the right puppy and I was sat there thinking “so how did you get blind sided by a puppy farm? That’s like point number one to learn when acquiring a puppy nowadays! How did you manage to do everything wrong when sourcing a puppy?!” Now I know
I'm a super charitable person (probably too charitable), but Blair getting what appeared to be a puppy mill dog did make me a little suspicious of how much integrity she really had, and I think that's when I started to distance myself from her channel. The way she instantly started treating that dog as an accessory for her brand made me uncomfortable, too.
NOW i remember when i watched one of her videos. a friend back in high school (we're both in our 20s now) was explaining to a young oblivious teenage me about puppy mills n such and i think it was an iiluminaughtii video they showed me. if i remember right i think i ended up going and looking up stuff to read instead because i could not focus on the way she spoke dkfjghdfkj
**Googles**
How to get puppy
**click on first result**
The funniest part of her Wikipedia plagiarism apology with the Stanford Prison Experiment is that she could have just. Scrolled down to see the criticisms page to begin with and realized she was spreading misinformation. She didn’t even read the whole page
Maybe she just saw the word "criticism" and instinctively disregarded it
They must have edited the page. I don’t see a criticisms page. Which is weird cause I swear it was there too.
@@chickenmaster66If that was said with the intention of making people actually read wikipedia for once well you got me and I thank you for this, and the history of the page shows that the section was always named "Ethical concerns"
Not just scrolling down, it literally says in the second paragraph of the Wikipedia page, "Volunteers were chosen after assessments of psychological stability and then randomly assigned to being prisoners or prison guards. Critics have questioned the validity of these methods."
@@chickenmaster66 Each Wikipedia page has a history. In the top-right of the page, press the "View History" URL, and you'll see the list of all edits done to the page.
To think that Tom Scott recently went on-record apologising for and correcting every minor mistake he’d made over the past ten years. And the video wasn’t even that long.
Pretty sure Tom Scott is a saiyan
@@bradfjordnah he's a pirate
@@SirPhysicshe can be both, as a treat.
@@SirPhysicsNo mad captain Tom died after sailing out of some western facing port easterly
Honestly Tom Scott is fantastic. I love that he's now made a career out of travelling to cool places and teaching people about random sciency things.
The idea that every iiluminaughtii video creates a new subcommunity who knows she's full of shit is exactly right. She did a video and livestream about the obscure cult my dad was in, and I tuned in out of interest, only to find that she'd completely missed all of the interesting things about the cult. I tried to bring that information up in the livestream and she jumped on me like a Puma to accuse me of defending the cult.
OH HELL also that both neat (dad in cult) and OH (dad was in CULT)
Do you mind me asking what cult he was in? Admittedly I'm just fascinated in researching cults (so if you'd like to recommend other articles I'd also be interested) but I totally understand if you'd rather not
@@illumenaudieyour name is very scarily close to being pronounced illuminaughti
@@ablone It's Blair's photo in the PFP-
@@ablonebecause the illuminati is a very popular and widespread concept, and what Iilluminaughtii (as well as this person) based her name on.
The petty part of me likes to imagine Illuminaughtii thought she was safe after the bulk of your ire in the other video was spent on Somerton. This is basically the equivalent of storming back into the room after you've gone off on someone saying, "AND ANOTHER THING!"
It's like the Columbo signature move of investigative bollocking
*Harris scratches his head, turns around*
"Oh just one more thing"
@@cornparade6874my guy sent her to the *COLUMBO DIMENSION*
Oh hi! You're that guy with some of the best videos about Amphibia and Cartoon Saloon i've watched. Great work, man.
I'm glad he made this video because now whenever someone searches illuminaughtii, this is going to pop up. She's clearly going with a strategy of disabling all comments and pushing out videos as usual, waiting for this shit to pass so she can continue stealing others' work. So I hope new people actually watch this video before checking her out.
the "Zimbardo speriment" was such a quiet and casual murder hahaha
15:08
The guy in the documentary: "They booked the festival during the busiest weekend of the year: It's called the National Regatta. It's *LIKE* the Superbowl *THERE* "
Iilluminaughtii: "McFarland had booked the Fyre festival the same weekend that the National Regatta takes place in Bermuda. This boating event is massive, *bigger than* the Super Bowl."
I'm not an expert on boating sport events, but I'm fairly certain that the guy just used some analogy to emphasize the relative size and importance of this event *there*.
But she used that line, to then morph it into some alternative reality where this boating event is bigger than the 6th most watched annual sporting event in the world.
And just to be sure, I quickly looked it up and yes, the Superbowl has ~110 million viewers, while the National Regatta has at best some ~6 million.
this is such a perfect microcosm of the larger problem. how many hundreds of thousands of times did people hear this particular piece of misinformation? the overall impact of such a mistake might be small, but it is so existentially BAD to be filling the world with nonsense and people having no idea they are carrying it around.
It's something hbomberguy talked about in the main video, that these bad plagiarisers sometimes try to alter the wording of the things they're stealing, but because they're so bad at it, they end up actually completely changing the meaning of what they're saying. So they can't even _STEAL_ correctly.
Absolutely. I've heard tons of events described as "the Superbowl of [the niche community/interest the event is part of]" and interpreting that metaphor to mean it's literally the same size as or bigger than the Superbowl feels like just... literally not being able to understand metaphor?
@honoratagold Hbomberguy videos are like the Superbowl of nerdy video essays
@xXluluchanelXx & @duffman18 Exactly! In the grand scheme of things, this random piece of information is unimportant and completely harmless to get wrong. But it is extremely indicative of the absolute laziness of these plagiarists. Like @honoratagold points out, this is *obviously* an analogy said as an analogy. It's even a very common analogy. So getting this wrong shows she is not paying attention at all to what she's even stealing from, and also that later, during the ""writing"" of the script or the recording of it, she's not paying any attention. Again, you don't need to be a sports event expert, to realise that some boating event in Bermuda isn't *bigger than the Superbowl*. If I'd accidentally written something like this, I would notice when reading and recording the script.
@@duffman18his name is hburgerguy 🙄
"Does she record these in one take?" Yes. She flubs her lines throughout entire videos. For a time I considered editing together a compilation of every time she flubbed, in a playful way. I'm glad I didn't. She probably would've been out for my blood.
Now that would be funny
Nah she'd get your tendons first
@@airplanes_aren.t_realChortles at the Stars, Tendons in hand*
I would absolutely love to do that. if only I had the storage 😞
She would have stolen your house
The 4-hour video was the main course.
Todd in the Shadows video was the dessert.
This is the after dinner mint.
We eating good
I have not had a single unique experience
FR
"What about second dinner?"
And the Silent Hill 2 video Harris mentioned SHOULD BE THE ICE CREAM
Harris, I ate my greens, GIVE ME MY ICE CREAM
You know what I find funny about Blair calling out Legal Eagle for “stealing her editing style”? Blair used to have a sponsorship from an editing company on her videos called Filmora, a video editing software she claims to use. So by her logic, anyone of her fans who downloaded Filmora based on her ad for them is now also stealing her editing style.
that’s not funny, it’s a logical pretzel, some might say 🥨
Is logical pretzel the modern take on the Uroboros? @@cybercop0083
*any one of her fans. I know it may not seem like it matters, and it may not "matter" as such, but there is a right way
lmao that's hilariously bullshit as well like you can tell her videos were NOT edited with filmora
@@ltbq She may actually use it but it is clear to me that she definitely is not the editor lmao. Technically correct, the best kind of correct.
stuff like this really helps me put my own gaffs in perspective. like damn, I really thought accidently citing Jan de Vries or falling for a citogenesis'd fake myth was as bad as it got -R
Yeah, this is becoming an issue especially because millennials and Gen Z do a lot of video essays. Just because how to technological and structural opportunity in the format of these videos that multiple people can produce that other generations haven't had and we have grown up on their predecessor versions. So it is an innovation and timing issue and like with any new innovation we have to work out the issues that arise from it and create socio-cultural expectations.
EDIT: Okay wow it took almost two weeks for me to see how "over reading" when reading my comment again seemed critical, that wasn't what I meant. Now I get all the criticism. Edited to fix.
Honest mistakes here and there are leagues better than anything grifters will ever have going on. Your work is FAR more entertaining too. Actual personality to it!
@@deiansalazar140 Please stop. We're starting to sound like our parents complaining about "This new generation is doing X or Y wrong! Back in my day...". Trust me, everyone from boomers to Gen Alpha are doing more social media than ever. But plenty across every generation are reading too. Not as much as... in the 90s sure. But this isn't something tied to generation. Let's top this fallacy now.
seriously, this shit is giving me the therapy for my imposter syndrome that I otherwise couldn't afford 🥲
I love your channel so much! I'm always looking forward to your trope talks, I find them so helpful and relaxing to watch and listen to!
I used to listen to Iilluminaughtii vids while doing school work because her channel is a bottomless pit until I finished for the day. Went to watch a documentary and realized I was listening to the exact same story again. I burst out laughing at the realization she just "quoted" the whole thing.
I hate to say it, but yeah, the videos generally made really good white noise for that stuff.
I only heard her videos THRICE
First about debunking fake traditional builder youtuber that once popular in covid era
Second about debunking cute dodo that's actually just posting without context for the cuteness value
And then her controversies. It's kind of sad that she once sounds so righteous (especially in her cute dodo vid) and then BAM, she's actually a shitty person
They're like chicken nuggets. They get you fed but at the end of the day you'll hate yourself for eaating so many@@sholem_bond
I don't even mind if someone wants to just read stuff off it's just background to me anyway, but for fuck's sake why would you lie about it!?
@@vyvianalcott1681 because it is contrary to common believe illegal to steal other peoples work?
Blair is so condescending and arrogant in her delivery that knowing she’s just a no good thief is so therapeutic
Yes! I didn't watch that many of her videos because she sounded so haughty, like she thought she was superior to everyone. Reminded me of those know-it-all types, who are never wrong even though they make half the shit they say up. -Turns out she really does think she's better than other people, and doesn't need to make shit up because she just steals it instead.
She's a financial abuser too so I feel no sympathy for her and hope that she gets deplatformed
@@ncisfan1002Also just a stock standard abuser.
Her career has crashed already
Her massive moral grandstanding has always bothered me even when I watched her. Like we get it woman you hate everything on the entire planet the whole world is pure evil and you are just the angel informing of all their crimes that inspire you to do anything you put into.
she and somerton are quite similar in that sense where they present other people's opinions at you as if they're *obviously* true and you're stupid if you disagree.
Wait, wait, wait. I learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment at the University of Washington in PSY101. This would've been almost 20 years ago. We were taught that the 'prison guards' were coached by the 'observers', and that a lot of it was BS. Essentially the story of the 'experiment' was utilized as a cautionary tale for why (double) blind studies and safety standards are so crucial in research. And she actually thought it was a proper experiment that proved something!? Post 2020!?!?
Same here. It’s a shame she went this direction too because you can totally make a good video about this “experiment.” For better or worse, Zimbardo was an interesting guy, and the way he conducted this experiment is a master class in ethics. From inserting himself in the experiment to dating one of the grad students involved, there is more than enough material here to make an interesting video
@@Usagi393I was gonna say: Zimbardo was a creep.
@@Usagi393 Zimbardo not only ran an ethically compromised experiment, a notion he himself uses for self-promotion, he amped up the division, encouraged guards to abuse prisoners and lied about what occurred.
@@aarondavis8943Yes they know that.
I'm studying psychology at the moment and I was recently taught about the experiment. I was taught about it as if its findings were useful, but Zimbardo conducted it in an unethical manner. We did learn about some of its other limitations, but we learn a decent number of limitations for every experiment we study. It's still being treated as mostly legitimate in some schools.
As a former psych major, it was so vindicating seeing Zimbardo get discredited about the Stanford prison experiment because we had to watch so many of that fraud's videos about psychology during high school psych courses, and he was so fucking dry and intolerable.
It also gives horrible people the justification to STAY horrible.
“Did you know if you lock a bunch of protofascists in a prison and let them go apeshit on each other, they’ll go apeshit on each other and break their brains” yes, actually, and I knew that in theory and practice before man made lord of flies camp for science with similar men
This period of behavioral science where it’s just like... irrevocable torture... not into that not into how we did that
“I raised my son feral with a chimpanzee baby and mysteriously for some reason he later took his own life” OH YEAH?
I still agree with Zimbardo in regards to prison systems and how rehabilitation systems (a handful of countries) are better than punishment systems, which is how it is in most countries.
As a current psych major, I’m afraid as to what you mean because I thought Zimbardo just did the prison study
>former< psych major? happy to see you realized what a sham that "discipline" is.
I'm a scientist and this has legitimately made me more committed to research ethics than the hundred hour research integrity module we had to do...
This feels like how my learning of the existence of antivaxxers as a child made me no longer resist getting shots. Sometimes it’s the knowledge of someone being so much worse that make you want to be better out of spite lol
For real 😭 If I ever become a lecturer, I'm forcing everyone to learn about her and James Somerton/Nick Herrgot.
@@micheller3251why James Somerton ?
I'm a college student and I feel the exact same way
@@vickypedia1308James somerton is a gay essayist that stole articles, documentaries, and essays about gay or queer topics from gay and queer makers or creators. So basically a piece of crap of a person.
The Vocaloid one is especially egregious to me because you really could make a two hour video essay about crypton reviving early internet peer production culture, or how one man created one of easiest to use 3D animation tools of the decade along with a motion capture system using the Kinect that could run on a potato, or how Vocaloid 2 allowed numerous lgbtq+ producers and VAs in Japan to breakthrough into mainstream pop, but instead she reads uncredited fandom wiki articles while failing to understand that Vocaloid is a midi instrument and not some magical anime ai software.
Anyways is no one makes that two hour Mmd/moggproject video essay I will at this point out of spite.
Honestly as someone who knows nothing about vocaloid I would watch the SHIT out of that video
is the easiest to use 3D animation tool you're referring to MikuMikuDance?
Give us the spite video!
@@ReiAnikaAyanami yes, to this day I don’t think there’s been one that’s as easy to just pick up and use as MMD.
Please give us the spite video essay. I love MMD to bits, it introduced me to 3D animation and I still use it to this day.
When I followed Illumininaughtii, I frequently found myself reacting to bad reads, mispronunciations, awkward phrasings, and even misreading the literal words on the screen by saying "Wow, you realize you're allowed to do two takes, right?"
In retrospect, those were all massive warning that the plagiarism was even worse than was evident.
Legit thought she might have dyslexia, dyspraxia, or eyesight issues and thought it was so cool she was kicking ass despite it. Nope, she was just copying someone else's homework and still managing to screw it up. Honestly incredible she lasted this long.
The ONLY Illuminaughti video I ever watched was the Jim Bakker one, and it pissed me off that she kept pronouncing it "Backer." Maybe it's petty, but I honestly think that was the reason I never watched her again.
At the time I assumed she mispronounced it as a choice, like she smugly decided that she was the one who was saying it right and everybody else had it wrong. Now that I've seen this video and her segment in the other one, I'm inclined to think she didn't know that the correct pronunciation even existed.
I used to live here mlm stuff but when she did the sea world vid and got so much wrong (I'm obsessed with sea world) I just couldn't trust anything she had to say anymore.
@@CityofButterflyOut of curiosity, how do you pronounce it? Like "baker"?
@@piyo744 Yes
Wow. I can’t believe Tommy Tallarico was able to find out all of this stuff about her. His mother must be proud of him.
I was looking for this comment
Reading this comment made me need to go to the bathroom.
@@bigstevie01that seems slightly gamingly racist. I don’t respect gaming racism.
Chat is this too niche?
this has me hysterically laughing to myself
As he said about speaking mistakes, I usually don’t say anything when someone’s voice bothers me - but in this case, illuminaughtii’s voiceover work is her JOB, and moreover it’s the ONLY part of her job she actually has to put the barest amount of effort into. And she trips over her words constantly, she has this weird tone that’s both monotonous and full of unnatural emphasis, and she literally sounds like she’s about to fall asleep. It’s *exactly* what happens when people read blocks of text without absorbing anything, and they end up sounding like one of those unbearable tiktok AI voices. This is the ONE thing she’s supposedly bringing to the table. And it actively makes the product worse.
I remember, because her character is recognizable, to have watched one or some few Videos of her some years back. Only now, watching this video, I remembered the feeling that made me not want to watch her after that; it was exactly the monotony, the apparent lack of care and simply obvious low-effort production, comparatively to other video-essayists, stuck out to me - however, that the root cause was this blatant misbehaviour didn't even cross my mind. How ugly.
Apparently, it's really important to get it all done in one take without time to read beforehand, so she can get back to all the other work she has to do. Making alt accounts and cyberstalking ex-friends and rivals takes up a lot of time, you know!
@@FullMoonOctober I did that when I was unemployed (not for blood like her tho.). It is time consuming ... no time for videos!
For me James Somerton is even worse when it comes to reading stuff on camera.
He manages to sound both self-important and snobbish and like an ailing, exhausted 75 year old professor who’s about to keel over in the lecture hall. I barely got through the voice overs of his Hbomb provided for his video, because I wanted to tear my ears off listening to Somerton’s unbearable droning. Even the way he pauses towards the ends of his sentences is annoying, cause it’s clear he’s trying and failing to sound like the thoughts he read off are his own. The guy truly has negative charisma.
the main thing i noticed with these examples is that they didn't seem like mistakes of someone who has trouble reciting text. the way she tones sentences jsut sounds like she was reading the script for the first time. i heard it all the time growing up during group reads in english classes. nothing wrong with that, but its clear that its just something she's doing to maximize profit
"Everything she sees turns to nonsense, like a weird Medusa" That's either hilarious, or even more terrifying than the original Medusa story.
I always thought she had a weird cadence to her speaking, then your video brought to light what was really happening. She was reading writing she wasn’t familiar with, and you can tell.
oh my god you're right
Was nobody quality checking these videos when they were done? How do you leave stumbling and mis-speaking over and over, in your videos? It's so blatant, it makes her sound low IQ sometimes.. But now we know why.
Ahhh
Yes and often she doesn't stress the right words, so it sounds weirdly robotic :-/
@@rhythmandblues_alibi literally, like the way she says the phrase "on a deserted island" but chops up the word into "desert ed" like she fully forgot what words she copied and pasted into her google doc and is just reading with no thoughts..... hilarious tbh
After watching your breakdown of what Iilluminaughtii was doing, I went to check the news on my local paper's website and noticed some of the tricks you mentioned in one journalist's article. Several hours of a wormhole later I can confidently say he has never written an original thing in his life and I genuinely don't know what to do with this information.
Thanks for the new critical reading tools, and the bottomless feeling of disappointment.
Contacting the original writers he plagiarized as well as his boss are potential routes. If they don't do anything, spamming it all over their social media might do something. Depends on how much free time you have.
Contact the Editor in Chief of your local paper with a complaint about it while being polite. If they blow you off or just ignore you, contact any other papers in the area about it.
@@AinuLaire I've contacted the editor of a paper he most frequently reorders words from with some examples, I'm putting together a broader selection for his own paper. I'm shocked honestly
Ugh. This is proving to be my experience as well. Harry has given us the glasses from They Live and now we can't take them off again.
Definitely write a letter to the editor and/or publisher of the paper about it. Newsrooms are often wildly understaffed, so it's fully possible they just don't know because they haven't been able to deep-dive edit this guy's work.
She's so deep in the plagiarism pit that she's pagiarising pagerized content. Its almost impressive.
plageception
"pagiarising"
paralegalizing
Reminds me of JacksFilms bingo nights on SSSniperwolf and how they ended up finding she frequently freeboots off of freebooters. If you're so used to stealing for your content, why would you care if it's already been stolen?
Palaragariarotiarozition
I feel so sorry for the illustrator who did her little triangle head character. Not only is she trying to cease and desist that person for ???, but a lot of people (me included) have such a visceral reaction to that little character now, because Blair's been revealed to be SUCH a piece of trash.
Did she really send some legal garbage their way too? I went to their Tumblr and followed back in the day because I liked their style, so now I'm curious how they're doing 😕
It's a great design! I'd never heard of her because I don't really seek out TH-camrs so she had no reputation to lose when I watched Harry's video, but I was like "Dang I really like that character design, too bad she's an obvious fraud and idiot"
it's such a simple but cool-looking and iconic design, too. i can't imagine designing and making sprites for a growing youtuber, only for that to be plastered everywhere on the internet because said youtuber was a massive liar and manipulator
btw i believe the artist's name is plaguebirb? (very skillful artist btw.) i haven't heard yet about them getting sued by iilluminaughtii, just her victims and detractors. when were they sued?
As a psychology student I had no clue it was possible to butcher Stanford that bad lmao
we're literally taught it in order to talk about what was wrong with it to learn proper analysis. But then again, these people are plagiarising so they don't need to learn how to analyse, so it checks out.
it gives me such deep secondhand embarrassment like no!!! girl!!! stop!!! you dont have to do this!!!! watch more than one documentary at the very least!!!!
My AP Psych teacher in high school loved Zimbardo for some reason and taught us that it was a good experiment to show how power corrupts people. She showed a picture of her meeting him too. This was like 5 years ago so maybe it wasn’t as well known that a lot of popular psych studies have shitty experimental protocol
@@gracefoster7587 it is correct that it's a good study on power corrupting people in the sense that Zimbardo got so wrapped up in his fake persona of prison warden that he lost objectivity in the study, but a bad study on power corrupting people in terms of how it didn't achieve that aim the way it intended to and failed in too many aspects to have reliability or objectivity. The way I was taught about it was that it's a good talking point in psychology, not a good study. So correct in one sense.
As for the meeting him and having an overly positive view thing, I think your teacher should have reviewed cognitive biases before choosing to be so invested in the teaching of that study lmao
Dude I’m not into psychology but even I know the basic facts about the Stanford Experiment. It’s been overwhelmingly used as the first example of scientific misconduct in ANY scientific field, even STEM.
Wild to see even this is just straight up wrong and stolen
noooo they didnt do the hecking work and nothing bad will happen to them nooooo this is a huge tragedy :((((
The kicker for me is that if she just marketed her videos as recaps of documentaries etc they’d probably still be popular
Summaries might not be considered transformative under fair use. Advertisers would be more wary of sponsoring her at the very least. If it's the same content in the same order, it might even be considered a derivative work in court - also not fair use
@@aquaintsoundThis exactly. Plus, even if she legally could get away with it, "recaps" would still get views but probably not as many; which would not be appealing to a greedy person. Also, from a purely ego-driven perspective, "I summarize documentaries" doesn't sound as impactful as calling yourself a journalist/essayist... almost like she doesn't do much of anything at all. 😅
Nah she'd still be under fire for all the other shit she did
as someone who used to use her videos as background noise, yes.
@@aquaintsound It shouldn't be transformative, but there are plenty of movie recap channels getting away with it as we speak.
I appreciate you trying to steer clear of pointing out people's mispronunciations in general, but you're absolutely correct to underline it during an examination of plagiarism. In college, I worked as a writing tutor, and we heavily encouraged students to read their writing aloud to us. Not only did it help them hear how their writing would sound to an audience and lead them to catch their own mistakes, but it also served to call out possible plagiarism when they couldn't pronounce or define half the words they claimed to have written.
On one hand, I tend to give people leeway. The effect of not knowing the pronunciation of a word you've only seen in print is widespread enough it has a term - calliope syndrome. On the other, I think you're exactly correct. Someone who's doing enough research would have taken the time to learn the pronunciation of at least the major terms being used in the presentation.
Reading your writing aloud was recommended to me, as well. It has helped me many times.
Not being able to define is fair but pronunciation isn't a sign of plagiarism. There's tons of words, especial academic jargon, that I had only seen written in college and didn't realize I was pronouncing incorrectly until the word was finally used in a lecture.
Also I've had professors teach me the wrong pronunciation
Not being able to define words is suspicious but pronunciation isn't a sign of plagiarism. There's tons of words, especial academic jargon, that I had only seen written in college and didn't realize I was pronouncing incorrectly until the word was finally used in a lecture.
Also I've had professors teach me the wrong pronunciation
@@UD503J lol Even reading the word "calliope" in your comment, my brain first read it as Cally-Opi before I corrected myself.
the happy royalty free music in illuminaughtis video vs the documentarys appropriate eerie music is driving me insane. it cant be only me right
It does NOT surprise me that someone wrote an entire google doc about the seaworld one. I know next to nothing about that industry, but what made me realize she was full of shit was a zoo-based video. As someone who is in the ecology community, I'm very aware of the criticism of zoos- which is why her video on zoos rang out as 100% bullshit. she did the same thing as you describe with the Autism organizations; she repeatedly says she hates PETA (and has multiple videos about how PETA sucks) but quotes organizations that are basically PETA-lite about zoos. There are a bunch of things wrong with the zoo industry, it's a very nuanced topic, but she's just reading off sources about how keeping animals in captivity is dangerous. The most galling- AND DANGEROUS- thing she did is at the end she tells people /not/ to go to accredited zoos and to instead go to local wildlife centers and nature centers. As someone who has connections to that industry.... no. just no. I recently went to a private wildlife center (in a rural area with no zoos) and witnessed a man holding a baby american alligator let a bunch of children pet it. Its mouth was not taped shut (any large crocodilian needs tape around its jaws if its going to be around people, it doesnt hurt them). That man was well meaning, I think, in starting that nature center but it is extremely irresponsible to allow that. Even a baby american alliagtor can rip off someones finger, especially a child. Many "rescue centers" operate as unaccredited zoos, which means they have NO standards they have to meet, no inspections, and no guarantee of professionalism.
@@king-of-swing it surprises me someone would be so unnecessarily hostile? there are 6000 other comments to go pester, shoo
I never watched the zoo video from Blair, but as a person with an interest in conservation and animal welfare, that sounds like some seriously dangerous misinformation that she's spreading.
@@king-of-swingReading's tough
@@king-of-swing bordering on illiterate
The jaws of those things are terrifyingly strong. 😳
It just occurred to me… in Folding Ideas’s Contrepeneurs, he mentions that the quote limit for ghostwriters working for a writing spam mill is 10% of the total. Which is already a lot. This is literally worse than spam writing.
It says a lot that she wouldn’t even be able to get a job at a SPAM MILL.
That's ...telling
Hindsight is 20/20, but I'm now remembering a lot of things that rubbed me the wrong way about Blair but I dismissed as not a big deal at the time. One of them was a video about casinos that went into detail about the psychological tricks that casinos use to keep people hooked to the machines. After saying all of that, Blair went on a strange tangent saying that she didn't necessarily have a problem with the business model and considered becoming a casino owner herself. I was like, "Wait, I thought we were talking about how BAD casinos are?" Looking back, that was definitely a case of Blair letting her true exploitative nature slip out.
Wow, plagiarist, content mill, landlord AND casino mogul? The sociopath quadfecta!
I mean from your description, it sounds like she just read out a video she didn't write, then attempted to put a personal touch on the end. And the tones are completely disparate because she didn't write, or even understand it
From how she treated OT and the Click I'm not surprised
To me it was the virtue signal in her videos. People who virtue signal usually have something to hide.
I always watched her videos kinda casually in the background, but I caught one of her story time livestreams and something about her tone while telling the story really put me off, but I thought I was maybe misreading tone bc I struggle with that. Still ended up backing away from her content somewhat after that, but that combined with some controversial sponsors (considering her channel content) left me unsurprised when all the dirt about her came out.
Even amongst people in the niche Blair is nominally in, anti-MLM (multilevel marketing) TH-cam, Blair has a BAAAAAAD reputation for not only threatening smaller creators who displease her but also for outright stealing others' research and anecdotes without credit. I don't know of any other creator who still considers her a friend or colleague.
Iiluminaughtii seeing the original essay is mainly about James Somerton : "Phew I got off easy"
HBomberguy obscur forgotten second gaming channel : "Wait a minute"
Tbf, blair had another issues to be dealing right now. Her being unethical toward former employee / collaborators hurt her brand more. Her doing plagiarism was basically just cherry on top at this point.
@@dodixaverius9176sometimes terrible people have redeeming qualities. This is not one of those times lol.
It's hilarious in retrospect, being someone who used to watch her MLM/Corporate Casket videos (and subsequently fell off when she started doing a lot of.. not that), that I used to read her fumbling with her script as a sign of sincerity. I thought it meant she was speaking more from her mind, remembering her research from notes and not reading and re-reading the same lines of text to get the perfect run. Now I know it's because she was reading words written by someone else which she had probably not even read once all the way through before hitting record. Pathetic.
Also, her Standford video was one that triggered some flags for me at the time as well. I gave her more credit than I should've on account of the fact that I recently had attended an entry level psych course at my University where they incorrectly taught about the experiment using the same outdated misunderstanding of it that she did. That's kind of how it goes when you have 70 old people who don't actually care about their field/don't keep up with contemporary research and just assume everything they ever learned is still as true as when it was taught 50 years ago teaching intro courses, but in hindsight it should've been MORE alarming that someone who was doing modern research didn't immediately realize how incorrect that information was.
Okay, yeah, somebody else who also had this impression about her mistakes. I thought so.
My experience mirrored yours exactly! Pathetic is def the right word lol
I literally thought she might have dyspraxia or dyslexia because she misread and mispronounced so many words so often. I was like, "damn it's cool to see her succeed despite her struggles, gives me hope!" nope lmao she's just copying a smarter person's homework and somehow managing to fuck it up anyway.
i thought the same. it didn’t sound like someone just speaking from their mind instead of reading off a script - people might stumble on words as they start to say something but reword mid-sentence, or pause as they search for the word, but I don’t hear people talk like that naturally. and if she was doing that, it wouldn’t feel like it were coming from a place of sincerity - if you’re trying to put together a polished, well-researched video /essay/ for your audience, you’d want to sound like you’re familiar with the facts and that you prepared how to frame and articulate the information by writing a script, not just remember things off the top of the head and leave in distracting stumbles through the information. if you have an aside or point you’re adding on the fly it wouldn’t happen as persistently as it does with her.
so because it seemed consistent but also an obvious thing that most video essayists would edit out, i chalked it up to dyslexia or something - it’s totally understandable that if she has a persistent struggle with reading the script that would turn a single line re-read into several takes, she would opt for just doing her best and presenting from the script how she would naturally. it’s like someone with a stutter not putting themselves through the exhaustion of re-recording every time their stutter pops up and instead leaving it in because it’s a natural part of how they speak. that at least seemed more sincere and not lazy to me. but nah, she’s just insincere and too lazy to both research and record lines.
A few years ago I became friends with a person on twitter who wrote freelance articles. One day she bragged to me about how she could spend a few hours in the morning googling about a subject, then write an authoritative article on the subject that afternoon before moving on to her next article. She cited one of her articles to me in a discussion about an area of pharmacology that I earned a Ph.D. in and had published original research on. I'm sharing this story because she reminds me of illuminati - doing a very shallow dive into a subject area, then plagiarizing/misunderstanding other people's work with no real clue about how lazy, inept, and Dunning-Krugerish they are.
Was she really framing it that dramatically, though? That's what I do for a living. In my experience, most of us know it's a pretty "jack of all trades" situation. It's interesting how many topics you can get introduced to in a day, and the content you're writing is essentially as authoritative as it needs to be, but it's also short. It would never make for a 10-20 minute video, they're usually articles that basically summarize information as an introduction to a field and then link sources that provide more info. And the clients are usually involved in said field, so you'd hear back if anything was improperly fact-checked. It actually sounds like your understanding of article writing might be even more shallow than her understanding of pharmacology.
It makes me mad because part of the reason people like Blair and the person you are describing exist is because primary, secondary, and post-secondary school cirriculum does such a piss poor job on teaching people sourcing. It is my full belief that it is why people believe the most absurd rumors and misinformation then continue to spread it. I understand the tech boom added to this, but there are no longer any excuses to not question what you ate reading or watching on the internet. I was in a STEM major and they drilled how to think critically about even primary sources of lit and how to properly source research and find what is considered reputable sources. You could use Wikipedia but just to help find good sources or keywords to search. Blair is the poster child of plagiarizing and would speed run getting expelled at any school that has standards.
@@kieranhair37 Vomiting half information everywhere in a pretty, readable way does not become righteous because you made it into a profession... "It's as authoritative as it need to be" If the experts in the area say it should have 0 authority, there's no argument to sustain it. Not that you would know the argument anyway, with a morning of research to summarize the work of a lifetime.
@@HouseDagothCultist The problem is that good writing and communication skills are also the work of a lifetime, and you only get one lifetime. A lot of expert knowledge is locked up in bad communication because that's only a secondary interest *at best* to the academics, it serves a real purpose for dissemination when this is done well.
This is an apology from the science writers to the scientists out there - Some of us do actually try.
@@rossjames8839 Is because academia teaches people how to write in the most boring way possible. Probably because they themselves where thaught that way.
I am surprise no one have thought of using video games to teach history. Probably because it would require a video game programmer who is also a historian.
Plagarism aside, I checked in on all the other "Drama" around Illuminaughtii and it would be more accurate to call it widespread abuse towards all the people around her. Pretty cartoon villain shit. It's insane that she cultivated an audience of people who hate abusive or corrupt or untrustworthy companies, while being all of those things, and not thinking it would bite her in the ass one day.
I suspect "Not thinking" accurately describes her default disposition. She really comes across as a genuine idiot.
"i didn't think the leopards would eat MY face!"
Abusive people are VERY good at attracting those who are most susceptible to abuse.
Thanks for mentioning this!!!! I was about to write my own comment lol
It’s crazy she didn’t even try to hide it,, did she really think she wouldn’t be caught???
I used to be a massive fan of Blair and watched a lot of her videos back then. I showed one to my mom and she said "this video is just a bunch of articles read to me". I now realize my mom was right and Blair makes a mockery of the video essay genre. I was watching good video essayists at the time too, like Jacob geller, philosophy tube, and ofc hbomberguy. She just takes what makes a good video essay, squeezes the life out of it and patches it up with flashy editing and a sarcastic avatar
Lmao does anyone remember when she was sponsored by Established Titles?
Funny, I liked her because she seemed more tolerable than most breadtubers
Jacob Gellar is such a FANTASTIC video essayist. Possibly my favorite of all time.
@@MagdiJustoto be fair, so many people briefly were, it was the cringiest shit
@@samseery1595same!
The whole "I make THREE videos a week for you guys" is so funny cause I've seen people who upload like every day not nearly have this many errors
I briefly binged her videos for a while and enjoyed them, sort of like a Baby’s First Last Week Tonight without the jokes, just a brief summary of a subject. But then after a while I gave up because the huge chunks of reading quotes was boring, I felt like the delivery elsewhere felt hollow, and occasionally I’d hear her say a word totally wrong and do the biggest double take, because it just happened so often. Plus I couldn’t ever work out why the videos just sort of *ended* without a decent structure/wrap up, just an unimaginative “well that’s all we have time for” after one of the points/bits of info, and I was like “but sometimes she’s so eloquent? Why is this aspect so lazy???” Little did I know lol.
I noticed over time that the quality and tone of her videos was super inconsistent, but I thought that was because she had multiple writers, not because she was reading articles at me.
@@larissabrglum3856 that was my initial assumption too! I was like “I bet she doesn’t write much, she’s just the voice while other people on her team do all the writing”. Lol yeah but not on her team…!
Holy crap it’s Ellen. Thanks for all your effort on xboxtra and your guest appearance on NRB was great
It's a surprise that will help us later! (/j)
Same. I found her channel and gave it a few listens... But her content felt weirdly like a high end AI reading a script. Like, yeah, a script is necessary for long form videos... But when reading your own script, most people emphasize certain points and have inflection in their tone. Especially if you're doing it professionally. You get over the middle school speech anxiety pretty damn fast.
Her scripts were strange and uninspired imo. And it makes sense because she's stealing content from multiple sources that weren't written for a video essay.
Video essays are a unique medium adjacent to documentaries. And when someone steals from a different medium and smashes it into a video essay... It feels off. And her videos rarely utilized the format to it's full extent. And instead opted for stock images to the point of overkill. I guess that's why she started stealing full documentaries.
Also the only tone or emphasis she ever added that I noticed was a "holier than thou" attitude that even if her content was well researched and not stolen, was incredibly off putting to me.
If the only passion you bring to the table is being a condescending prick... I'm not going to waste my time.
I stopped watching Blair entirely after her Roblox episode. The structure was ripped, verbatim, from People Make Games, and it just so happened I'd seen their investigation first. She threw in two citations when, if she really cared about credit, she'd have to cite the entire video. Iilluminaughtii's version was a ludicrous downgrade from her source material. PMG did genuine journalism. They interviewed several young developers who'd been worn down and exhausted by Roblox's predatory monetisation structure. Those interviews formed the backbone of the video's thesis (you know, the thing video essays are supposed to have): letting corporations exploit the labour of children primes them to accept future abuse in the workplace.
Well, what does Iilluminaughtii have to say about the exact same subject matter? Exploitation... is bad. Children... should not do gambling. Grooming... also bad. Stunning and insightful analysis. She gutted an essay and converted it into a drama video. She's a drama channel. Once I realised that, I couldn't stomach any more of her output. Blair covers staggeringly dark topics such as Indigenous boarding schools and the abuse of autistic institution patients, and she does so with all the tact and compassion of a high schooler gossiping at the lunch table. She shoves Hello Fresh adverts and dog plushies next to stories of mass child graves and electroshock torture. She never questions the systemic causes of these atrocities because that'd require more thought than skimming their Wikipedia pages. A content farm in action.
I remember that Roblox episode. Another TH-camr who’s an alt right plagiarist content farmer Moon did a video on Roblox. Jack Saint did expose him. Blair isn’t educational when her channel is somehow categorized. She’s not a licensed educator and makes way more than an actual licensed teacher. Why couldn’t people realized that earlier? I always hated her and was waiting that she will have a downfall.
Well said. I remember watching one of her videos about the trafficking of Indigenous Canadian women, and the way she talked about it was just… extremely off-putting. She repeatedly stated over and over how “horrified and disgusted” she was in her “research”, but she said it in that same, monotone, bored voice and repeated it so many times that it sounded like she was trying to convince us to feel something.
Iiluminaughti really is the CinamaSins of video essayists. No effort, no passion, no artistry, just an endless content assembly line designed to get as much attention as possible with as little engagement as possible.
I’m surprised she’s managed such a following because if you don’t know the videos are literally a wiki page being read to you, they still feel like it. Just incredibly dull with nothing added unless you’re really into reacting avatars.
I'm surprised people are still dunking on CinamaSins. I haven't seen a video of theirs in a while, but people seem to be staying mad at them because they pick apart movies to death to find any and every flaw and rate it solely based on how irritating it is. Like that has been the point from the jump.
@@vvitch-mist20From what I can tell CinemaSins isn't ruining lives or anything, but a lot of their videos as of late have been them trying to genuinely criticize a film under the thin guise of "satire." It's one thing to nitpick, it's another thing to skim through the movie and just claim something is stupid because you don't get it, and then act holier than thou when people rightfully call you out
@@vvitch-mist20 For me, watching them was actually damaging to my writing abilities, because it somehow got the idea into my head that a story without clear direction for every scene and explanation of every single plot point with even a single cliché was automatically awful. They say they're doing it because "satire" but what exactly are they satirizing? They're just being mean, and claiming it's criticism, all while somehow not having a single thing they actually give any semblance of praise to
@@vvitch-mist20I kind of agree, don't know why people dunk on them so much knowing the channel's name. But I do personally think it isn't fun or enjoyable in any way to hear someone hate on different parts of movies for mostly no reason. I love watching movies and even some of the lowest rated movies I'll sit down and the watch the whole thing and get some real laughs out of it. Movies are made to be enjoyed and can definitely be enjoyed while CinemaSins is made to criticize and.... Well... Hearing people be bitter and complain about things every making moment of their existence isn't particularly fun for me.
As a VOCALOID fan i can talk for days about vocal synthesis and the science and culture behind it, but I can talk for weeks about how Blair spread so much misinformation about it, yelled at people who wrote their college thesis on it when they said she was wrong, and decided to argue with a lot of us on twitter instead of just admitting she was wrong.
Needless to say, feeling a wee bit vindicated in someone deconstructing her lazy writing 😅😊
I’d love to hear more abt this, can you summarize what kind of stuff she got wrong?
I would absolutely love to hear someone go on about it tbh, and would die to read such thesises. I would even accept someone transparently reading the thesis with permission so I can enjoy it in the background
@@samkuperman9035 got a bunch of names wrong, got the song names of a dead producer wrong, cited Crediting Discourse as being a thing in 2021 when in reality it hadn't been a thing in over a decade, thought a Korean voicebank for Vocaloid 3 was a producer, called a bunch of producers pedos bc she didn't understand that Miku's age is explicitly intended to be fluid, blamed the community entirely for a whitewashing controversy of the two first Vocaloids (Leon and Lola) even though Yamaha put white stock photo models on their boxart and didn't tell us that their VAs were black until years later (thus being the ones to first whitewash them), and threw a fit when people tried to correct her
@@samkuperman9035 oh yeah ofc just off the top of my head she claimed that SeeU was a producer (she isn't. She was the first Korean language VOCALOID voicebank for the engine and not a person), mentioned two voicebanks called Luon and Lucia and said they were made after miku had become popular (these voicebanks never finished production and were canceled), said that Miku was Crypton Future Media's second voicebank (incorrect, she was their third, MEIKO and KAITO were their first and second and were released as counterparts to eachother. Funnily enough, she never mentions KAITO) and totally misnamed artist Kenshi Yonzeu as "Kenshi Tonsu" (how do you even mess that up???), these are just things from the top of my head, its been years since i even watched that video so i know for a fact there's more in there that i cant remember.
What did she say
I used to watch her when her stuff was about MLMs, but when she shifted to true crime it felt very exploitative and content farm-y, so im not surprised that shes as lazy as all this
same
One of the apparent things about that is her MLM content was taken from the anti-MLM community. I would have no problem with that, except that she also was alleged to refuse to give credit to all the people in the community who did the actual research, to the point that they refused to share it with her or her paid underlings.
This is one of the allegations that got brushed to the wayside due to Blair’s overall abusive behavior, but it seems in line with her modus operandi.
@@PeripheralVisionary yup when I started reading r/antiMLM I realised she had never had an original thought in her life
true crime by its very nature is exploitative
She used to be a TH-camr who just read Reddit posts lol. Now she does the same shit, but she pretends she’s being original lol
there's a lot here obviously but the bit that grinds my gears the most is when she says "someone else had an entire box of pillows, and it became barbaric." Blair has rephrased the documentary in such a way that she's saying that the box of pillows became barbaric
Yeah, for me it was the "Focus on the Family" video. My reactions went from "Huh. I suppose she's too young to remember what they were like before the PR campaign to" "Holy shit, is she just quoting their PR material?" all the way to "Oh wow, you're just reading the wiki page verbatim..."
As someone whose parents were balls deep in that craziness for half of the 1990s, it was a pretty jarring collision with reality.
Almost want to check out that video now lol, I never knew she even touched the topic.
My parents have always supported Focus on the Family, so I grew up with that stuff. Have fond memories of some Adventures in Odyssey, but not much else.
@@annaairahala9462My morbid curiosity might drive me to look up the video as well.
It really hits you only when you’re part of that niche community that truly understands what the hell she’s talking about.
@@annaairahala9462 I should watch that video just to see how bad it is. Focus on the Family was my childhood in an even greater way as my dad and grandpa actually worked for them for nearly a decade in the 90s and early 2000s. That sh*t was pounded into my brain since I was born. Totally f*cked me up growing up as a gay kid in that environment, but I got out of it around 14 or 15 and finally accepted myself and I'm now in college, far away from all of that.
@@thebookishqueer Damn, I do not envy you one bit. That must have been tough.
I'm so glad you brought up the fact that the Stanford Prison Experiment is bs. It was basically just a play the Zimbardo directed and tried to pass off as a psychology experiment.
Have you ever heard of those psychological experiments where someone places people in an uncomfortable situation and expects them to either fall in love and furiously make love or to hurt and possibly unalive each other, but then they're surprised that nothing interesting happens no matter what the guy does? I feel like that's what happened with the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The guy really wanted a riot or something and what he got was some people roleplaying.
Im a psych student who didn't really hear much about the stanford prison experiment since like, introductory high school AP almost 10 years ago (treated it like a significant study), so it was kinda news to me lol. The context surrounding the study might have been briefly covered in a stats class regarding ethics in research, now that I'm thinking back, but I defninitely didn't realize/remember how over-exaggerated it was, and I feel kinda embarassed about it. There are other examples in history social psychologists might reference to exemplify circumstances in which people lose their individuality and become violent and cruel.
He plagiarized the experiment from one of his students, David Jaffe.
He plagiarized said experiment from his student David Jaffe!
With the amount of work Blair puts into not doing actual work, she could actually just DO the work. It's like me creating an elaborate fabric lasso to grab something across the room so I don't have to get up, only to knock a whole bunch of stuff over in the process.
It's a rube goldberg machine for feeding us shit
Funny and useful visual thank you
that sounds like something i would do when it's cold
amazing visual, I'm definitely stealing
Feel free, Lol.
Like many people in this comment section, I had a brief phase of binge-watching her channel (mostly the mlm stuff, while cooking dinner). But I remember quite clearly the moment I realized what a hypocrite she was. It was when she had a sponsorship for a credit/loan company. The whole thing sounded really predatory and not that different from all the shit she was "reporting" on. Also she was the only person (that I was watching at the time) that was sponsored by them. I can get behind the squarespace and hello fresh and whatever else but advertising to her viewers, telling them to take out a quick and easy loan with this super-simple and totally trustworthy online bank just felt hypocritical and against her supposed morals.
I got COVID in the summer of last year, ended up working from home for an extended time, and stumbled upon her MLM content while looking for longer, podcast-type content that could play in the background and where I could go from one to another without having to do too much searching.
I can't remember what the exact moment was that did it for me, but I didn't stick around too long, and I remember that when she got away from MLMs and into taking on bigger corporations and social issues I started to get the feeling she was just lashing out at things for clicks. I don't recall catching her in any particularly sloppy factual errors or anything, it just started to feel kind of shallow and sensational? Which in retrospect, gawking at MLMs having a 'Super Platinum Double Executive Level' isn't particularly deep or anything, but it is entertaining and you don't need a while lot to prove MLMs are bad.
...and I also remember having really bad deja-vu after I stopped watching? I kept getting suggestions for her new video on whatever MLM was being covered, and going "I know she did a video on that, and not *that* long ago!" I didn't circle back to confirm, but that left me with the vibe that she was just recycling and repackaging her old videos for easy views and hoping people wouldn't notice in large enough numbers.
I know exactly what you mean. I started watching her videos for the MLM stuff. I can’t remember exactly what got me to unsubscribe but I remember watching some of her videos and being surprised at how many she could churn out so quickly. I started to wonder how it was possible if she was actually researching properly and I decided to switch off at that point.
hello fresh is horrible too, she has zero morals lmao
@@hotpocketsat2am In what aspect, if I may ask for a tl;dr, i understandt they advertise themselves as "An echo friendly solution that prevents you from having to DRIVE to the store" but the one time I got hello fresh (a roomate ordered and a logistical error made his package free or smth so we shared) I remember it bringing SO MUCH EFFING PACKEGING, like, I can take the bus ride to the walmart or smth and not produce THESE MANY branded packages and bags, is it that?
I thought that hello fresh gas been accused by ex workers and current workers of a unsafe work environment
as someone whose just spent hours and hours agonizingly looking for sources, putting together interviews, and organizing all of my research while for a final that isn’t going to get me any clout…… watching blair do what would immediately get her a failing grade in school and fumble herself to success is actually gut-wrenching
I feel you.
I feel you
(I did not plagiarize this comment it is definitely original and mine alone)
I feel you
(I did not plagiarize this comment it is definitely original and mine alone)
(I did not plagiarize this comment it is definitely original and mine alone)
I touch thee
(It is absolutely original comment with absolutely original words without any plagiarism)
Man… man in a second year biology lab (university) rn, I have to prepare 2 15min a presentations, for which you only know the topics 3 days before, while being in the lab/having class from 8 am to 7 pm… Still i read my sources (like a 5 page NATURE paper about your „Visualization of an endogenous retinoic acid gradient across embryonic development“ (title lol, and just one of many (read till like 00:30 before bed) fully before i take the beautiful picutres and graphs for my presentation, which i ofc cite correctly. And than seeing ppl like that just makes me sick, putting no effort their research and just puking it out there. Even while she reads it she doesnt understand, its just hollow
It's kind of amazing listening to her soullessly recounting the documentary wording about human suffering and lack of basic needs, like she didn't even care enough to put it in her own words 😭 it hurts my brain watching these clips back to back
What broke me is the section where she had her little persona crying and looking all sad as she says "While this person died, another trainer was injured before" in the most uninterested monotonous tone ever all the while getting the person's name wrong!
If you told me this was either a comedy sketch or a Family Guy style cutaway I would genuinely believe you because it sounds like a setup/punchline to a joke!
@@beth7609How? Those setups would at least make sense
Riiight! It’s the reason I never watched her content even though I enjoy this genre on TH-cam. She sounds so bored and uninterested
@@beth7609 Wow, that's precisely one of the things that put me off from watching her 😂
This all gains new meaning when you realize how hard she went after her former friends. When the whole Sad Milk thing broke out, and she felt threatened by OzMedia(despite him, at the time, saying he's not gonna make a video of his own), first by sending him cease and desist and then threatening his home, because she manipulated him into an unfavorable housing situation way back when(which is it's own can of worms). Long story short, she can somehow forclose on the home. That forced Oz's hand and he made his response to that, and set up a go-fund me for legal fees and securing a new house. Blair or one of her flying monkeys, reported his go-fund me and had it suspended/deleted. I believe it got reinstated, but still...THIS WOMAN DID EVERYTHING IN HER POWER TO MAKE SURE SOMEONE WHO WAS THREATENING TO EXPOSE HER ENDED UP HOMELESS. again, she put MORE EFFORT into ruining her ex's life(whom she was misrtreating both emotionally and financially) than she does into her videos.
Oz's videos have been so illuminating (pun unintended) on this stuff, most likely because he was closest to her out of everyone. Worth a watch for anyone who's interested in what a POS she really is. I used to watch her stuff casually, not digging deep enough to notice the plagiarism or personal issues.
for ages it's been bothering me how so many youtubers could be writing words in their scripts that they don't know how to say or what they mean, and i realize now i've been listening to wayyyy more people reading off wikipedia and page 1 google results than i thought. thanks.
Yeah, it explains a lot
Its a big problem everywhere. So many articles are just rehashes of Wikipedia. If it gets on wikipedia it becomes the truth.
This implosion of video essays on youtube is kind of crazy, and it honestly checks out that tons of them are just copy/pasting or the video itselfis downright horrible and makes no real point. I started to notice it merely weeks ago, when I clicked on a few that were recomended and gave up on them after several minutes, a lot of them really are about nothing.
That definitely factors into it, though I wouldn't take it as a surefire sign that's it's plagiarism. People who learn words through books rather than hearing them often mispronounce specific words for years without realising. It's also pretty common for personality-based channels to have other people write or edit their scripts for them (but in the non-plagiarism way where they still do their own research and the writers get a writing credit).
It is very common to hear people pronounce 'mores' (as in social mores) as 'mores' (as in more of a quantity with an 's' on the end). I don't think this would have to do with plagiarism any more than any other reading, but now people hear each other say it on TH-cam and now its like the TH-cam pronunciation of the word
She accused another TH-camr as using Buzzfeed and Wikipedia as her only sources... yet she just reads others' work 🤔
The projection is going crazy
If she projected any harder she'd burn a hole in the wall
@@larissabrglum3856 That'd probably be the most original thing she's ever created
But she would NEVER stoop to stealing form buzzfeed, cause that would be wrong. ;)
projection
Thanks for bringing attention this, seriously. My wife is a former Jehovah’s Witness and knew something was wrong the instant she saw a cross get used in Blair’s video. They do NOT use the cross at all in that cult and it should’ve been extremely obvious with any amount of research.
Yeah one of first weird things JWs insist on is their belief that Jesus was nailed to a tree, not a cross, despite crux simplex being a thing and Romans really using X, T and I shapes crosses interchangeably so it wouldn't matter... Yet, this insistence on "IT WAS NOT A CROSS" is very extreme and a huge red flag it's actually a cult.
@@KasumiRINA "crux simplex" is an amazing autocorrupt
Crux simplex sounds like an obscure wrestling move @@ArtAngelE
Oh my god yes, at the time, I was just slightly criticizing her because I was a fan and said that it was extremely "surface level information" but now that she's going to be gone forever and either die a McDonald's employee or die rotting in her sloppy house, I can finally say Blair's JW video was an extreme insult to someone who survived that insufferable cult.
mostly unrelated but i'm honestly so happy to see JW's be recognised for what they are; a cult. ofc no fault to the victims, i'm very happy your wife made it out, but it's ridiculous how normalised they are within western countries
To clarify as a psychology PhD student (finishing up roughly now, wooo) the quality of psychology content on TH-cam is so poor that Blair's mangling of the facts actually never raised a massive red flag for me. Almost all psych content on TH-cam is deeply and fundamentally wrong (or boring lecture content).
What about "Psych2go"?
to be fair, "deeply and fundamentally wrong" is always true of psychology, given that the whole mess is made up of 10% badly intuited observations of strung out drug addicts and 90% completely made up BS.
^I'm curious to know the judgment passed on that account, too
I'm not even a psych expert, but fuck, the amount of ableism, especially against people with cluster b disorders in"""psychology""" videos is staggering. "Ten ways to see if your partner is a narcissist/has bpd/something" Did they ever realize that someone who has those conditions might be looking for reasources to help themselves and see a dozen videos spreading misinformation that presents them in the worst light possible. They are harming actual real life people ffs
Yo how was the journey getting it? I'm starting school this upcoming semester for psychology and am curious of what the path is like
Before all this broke, I noticed that she would frequently make pronunciation errors - specifically, confusing words that were spelled the same but had different meanings. I wondered how that kept happening if she wrote the scripts. Guess that's explained now.
I remember her saying that she's dyslexic and English isn't her first language, so I always assumed she had only ever seen those words written. I feel so silly for giving her the benefit of the doubt for so long
@@shani-just-shani Never feel bad for being kind. Just know that it's OK to temper your kindness with a little healthy skepticism. That is to say, if there's smoke it's generally prudent to at least check for a fire.
Remember her calling Rza , R Z A
@@shani-just-shaniMan, never feel bad for giving people the benefit of the doubt. That's exactly one of the main problems of human society, in my opinion.
People sometimes conflate this with being gullible. It's not being gullible, it's just accepting that there's always a chance someone knows better than you. After all, no matter the subject, there's always 8 billion of people out there to compete with, so it seems quite the chance you're gonna be wrong sometimes, and double checking before accepting any knowledge is true is never the wrong decision, even if that knowledge is your own.
Years before this I saw her back when she just read posts from Reddit which I don’t consider to be transformative by itself and it’s an easy way to make money off other people’s writing. I don’t care the legality of it-the ethics of it is that you make money off other people’s Reddit posts and prop yourself up to seem more important than you are to a certain community (anti MLM for example). I pointed this out and people told me I was reaching, but uh, hahahahahaha
It may be petty, but the constant misreads and mispronunciations were what made me stop watching iiluminaughtii videos. I never subscribed, but I'd been listening to her videos for background noise for a while, getting progressively more annoyed with her inability to read her own scripts right, but it wasn't SO bad that I felt the need to stop clicking on them entirely. Then she posted a channel update video where she said that she wanted to switch her videos to a more informal tone, and the rage I felt over her implying that her current sloppy, mispronounced videos were "too formal" drove me right over the edge to block her channel from my recommendations
I noticed the mispronunciations as well, and I remember her blaming it on her "Polish accent." Girl, even if Polish is your first language, you do not have a Polish accent
Getting to be that way with Omni. Bro claims to a have a cpa but cannot pronounce words/say names or communicate ideas very well.
Lmao based
For me it was the fish video where it was just hilariously obvious she was just reading off a true crime wiki from the way the video was structured lmao.
"Sorry, I'm gonna mispronounce this" do you not have the internet to find out how to pronounce it
what killed me about her was actually her filler commentary: "XXX company was found to do XXX: now, personally, i dont believe this is inherently bad: you do you. but i disagree with them when they aren't transparent about what they are doing". this exact same line is put almost after every quote.
'Shady' this, 'shady' that.
Well she uses her opinions like she writes her scripts. Copy Paste Copy Paste
@@AmaryInkawult She doesnt even write her own script though
A good tell that she plagiarizes stuff, she could've combined the statement and her opinion into one sentence, but it is much easier to interlace the plagiarized material with her commentary.
@@trainee5471 i think it was fairly obvious shes a content farm. It seemed like she picked a company at random and looked for company_name+boycott on google and just said everything that popped up.
Its like those channels that run through entire movies scene by scene like cinema sins, which start with niche movies to talk about their opinion on them but then just make a video about every new movie that comes out.
I went to uni for a psychology degree (not in the US or any English speaking country) and we were told about the Standford experiment as if it was a real and legitimate study by my professors. They didn't go into a lot of detail about it, but it was treated as a Known Fact™.
Misinformation always goes farther than people expect, and we as people tend to believe the first thing we hear about a topic, so correcting misinformation is always hard.
It's why "clickbait" is so rampant. Far too many people will ONLY read headlines and immediately assume whatever follows in the article is valid, and share it.
My professors in my psychology class did the same thing. Not sure if they just didn't know that it wasn't real
Information can travel slowly at times, get stuck in traffic. My psychology professor last semester actually said the Stanford Prison experiment was inaccurate, so I guess I'm lucky.@@TheSilverwing999
I have a Master's in Psychology in the US, and while we did learn about the Stanford Experiment, it was being taught to us not as a legitimate study in which anything was actually learned, but as a stain on the reputation of psychology. The only value the experiment has now is teaching us how important it is to maintain our strict ethical standards, because when we let them slip, people get hurt.
We were taught it was a real experiment too, only a few years ago (in a canadian university)
when the sad milk drama unfolded, she went on -twitter- *reddit* to complain about how the other members of the podcast, the "milkmen", weren't doing anything and were just lazy while she was having to do all the work, and made sure to say she was doing this on top of her main channel, colabs with other channels, her college degree, a soap business and three other businesses.
so next time someone brags about being a workoholic who just does an unreasonable amount of work in order to try and make themselves look better than someone else, check how much of their work is actually theirs.
She also signed over her own debts onto people she dated, without them knowing. That is so f**ked (among other things she's guilty of.) She's a manipulator in every respect.
Milkmen in response: "we are the milkmen, our milk is delicious."
Big Elon musk vibes
@@Noah-Shmoahyeah, like how Elon brags about his work ethic when it seems like all he does is just shitpost on Twitter.
@@Tommykey07 typing "concerning" or "looking into it" for every one of his bluecheck reply guys is Elon's actual job.
Blair sheepishly trying to pass offa joke from Trevor Noah as her own is the most amusing thing ever
If I'm not wildly off base about its meaning, I'm pretty sure the term "fremdschamen" applies.
@@sholem_bondFremdscham basically means "cringe" or "secondhand embarrassment," so I think it fits.
@@sholem_bond Blair just posted fremdschamen
i stopped watching blair the moment she started defending her choice to buy her dog from a puppy mill, and when she started making herself out to be the victim in that situation. the feeling of schadenfreude i get from watching her fall like this is incredible honestly
Especially when she made a video condemning people who got dogs from puppy mills. I don’t know why she’s apparently the only one, according to her that’s above the rules and laws of society. The level of hypocrisy with her is both hilarious and astounding.
To be kinda fair, she presented that video as a "I didn't know, this happened to me, don't do what I did, here's why." I think that's somewhat admirable. However I do wonder now how much of the non personal stuff was plagiarized.
@@AdaptiveReasoningi’ve heard that she had been warned and given advice on the red flags and how to avoid falling for a puppy mill, but disregarded the tips since “she could do her own research”
i do know for sure and want to mention, tho, that while being recommended adopting, she claimed that she wanted a pure-bred puppy because she had unspecified allergies and she wanted a dog that she “knew she could care for”, and that would make a samoyed the best fit for her.. despite the fact that she’s known to be a notoriously untidy and unhygienic person, while samoyeds need very regular grooming, shed a ton, and - yknow - there’s no breed that’s actually, fully “hypoallergenic”
The only way to not support a animal mill is to literally not support them & actively campaign against them.
If she really gave a sh^t about 'Rescuing animals from breeding mills', she would either try to buyout the mill or report it for animal cruelty.
Never liked her. Tbh, 1st I've ever heard of her. I think I may have even been linked to her Vaccine Video FROM HBombGuy! 🤣🤌
Crazy!
@@clown-cat I mean, she didn't lie, then. She did her own research! And going by her videos, this means she did a single Google search for "Is a Puppy Mill?" and when the top result didn't immediately declare it a puppy mill, that was clearly proof positive it wasn't a puppy mill and Blair is clear of all wrong-doing! /s
Around the time of the Legal Eagle drama, I heard this story from some years ago about Blair and this advocacy group that was trying to take down a very predatory MLM. One of Blair's "researchers" tried to join their Facebook group, but the advocates repeatedly rejected them because Blair was already pretty infamous among anti-MLM circles for being a plagiarist and also because their work was very sensitive due to the MLM being extremely litigious. However, a mod who wasn't in the loop let the guy in and predictably Blair proceeded to steal all their hard work for a video on the MLM, with the advocacy group only receiving a link to them tossed into a pastebin document with all the other sources she ripped off.
Hey, I wasn't expecting her horrible Vocaloid video to get mentioned here! I was one of the people who wrote the big doc on that, and my co-writer ended up getting blocked by Blair and her producer on Twitter and was told she wasn't "relevant enough to bother contacting for information" as if we even asked LMFAO. We thought at the time the video was just poorly researched (it was) and fucking linked Amino of all places as a source, but yesterday someone else on Twitter discovered she'd even plagiarised part of that video from an old article too. 😭😭
Did she find Gaijin Goombah's old vocaloid video and not realise he was joking?
That SUCKS! i know it's just a comment section, but I hope you feel more appreciated here than in those videos. That's a huge document!!
Hey, I was the person who found that article yesterday! small world
AMINO as a source ... Goddamn.
Linking amino??? As someone who used amino during my vocaloid phase (2014-ish), you should not find facts from there! Most of the people there qre between 10 and 15
I will never get tired of remembering the Silent Hill wiki's circumcision obsession, without a doubt the funniest wiki battle ever fought.
what the actual hell happened there???
@@taureon_ it was a bizarre time. One editor on the SH fan wiki added a section to the SH4 page about how the game was full of metaphor and symbolism about the trauma of male circumcision. An edit war resulted and it got stranger.
I was into SH at the time, so I saw the changed pages, but didn't get to find out what happened behind the scenes until much later.
@@taureon_WHANG! did a good video covering it if you want to see a video on it
@@LateNightTableCoI remember CyborCat also covered it, to her amusement
@@Lost-Lilim mate, that is fucking hilarious
That mention of Blair's SeaWorld video was a nice surprise. She's made 5 videos about the amusement industry so far and all of them are riddles with plagiarism and misinformation. I've been researching more into her video about Nara Dreamland and found out that she not only ripped Defunctland's video on the park, but also used it directly in her own video as footage without any mention of it (although ironically you can see Kevin's original source blurb in the bottom right [about 4 minutes in if anyone was curious])
Oh jeez, that's horrible... Kevin from Defunctland cares so passionately about his subject, and it takes him months to research and put his videos together. I really hate that there are so many 'bad' creators who drown out the good ones.
She was pushing in one that amusement rides were never going to be safe without Federal regulations the channel @coastercollege debunked that by the simple fact most Rides are bolted to the ground as permanent installs there never crossing the state lines and entering Federal jurisdiction and most states have intense safety inspections in my state PA the Amusment rides are inspected by a division of the Department of AG and they have a report line . th-cam.com/video/1NfBedCHBGI/w-d-xo.html she posted a new one after her non apology but her Action Park video also harps on ride safety paranoia. th-cam.com/video/mF6vyRFpywo/w-d-xo.html
@@jack-a-lopium Though also incredibly stupid, why the fuck would plagiarize the single biggest amusement park TH-camr on TH-cam. Like Defunctland is huge and gets millions of views how the fuck did she think she was gonna get away with plagiarizing him on the same platform.
@@daisyheadmaizy5183 Savannah Marie also.
I just keep making myself laugh thinking about a major motion picture film ending, fading to black, and then a pastebin link slowly rises up into frame.
The thing that always bugged me about her videos is that they were always really strangely paced, and they didn't seem to be written with a particular point in mind. So they would just kinda end in really unsatisfying ways, which is why I eventually stopped watching her videos entirely. But now it kinda makes sense why her videos are like that, cause she doesn't write anything, so her videos end when she runs out of material to plagiarise, and she can't be bothered to write an actual conclusion.
I noticed that after a while. Her earlier long-form content seemed to be better, but as time went on, I noticed that her videos were often just surface-level overviews of topics without a strong argument or point.
The last like ... half a year of her videos before the full meltdown and can opening of the situation so many videos felt like they were only half done. There was no point, no genuine commentary, it was as if she presented the situation and then went "that's kind of weird, don't you think?" with two or three sponsorships stapled on
Well said. Nailed it. Shes always just off. Now I know why. She got a taste of Fame and it went to her head
I used to grade essays and papers for English 110 and English 200 classes, classes typically taken by college freshmen. After that, I developed an intolerance for what I call "fake writing". "Fake writing" is writing fluff to fill a page limit, or paraphrasing the first result on google to fill a page limit. Freshman do this all the time.
Illuminauti is 95% filler. She expresses no genuine opinion or perspective in her videos. She just summarizes the first result on google. You may as well be reading AI generated ad-columns or the filler text on a recipe page. It's brain rot.
I mean it sounds like her videos are stitched together, but with no heart. And I do think despite the fact that she was masquerading as an intelligent person by stealing their work, she's actually an idiot and that shines through
I forgot what video it was but I got suspicious when instead of the ACTUAL cover art for Akira she used a gender-bent softcore nsfw version of it instead completely seriously 🤣 Its amazing how she consistently manages to mess up so bad
lmao she did WHAT
Tf
ooo wish i saw that. that would tip me off lol
I am begging for a source.
I think I saw that one too. And used it repeatedly, if my memory serves.
I remember the Heaven's Gate episode, and she kept pronouncing Do's name like dew instead of doe. Their whole thing with their nicknames was that they were the musical scales. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do.
Isn't it "Sol" instead of "So"?
And "Si" rather than "Ti"?
@ObnoxiousGOOSE perhaps, if you are further into music theory than the average person, or Italian. "So" as in "So! A needle pulling thread" a play on the word "sew" and "Ti" as in "Ti! I drink with jam and bread" as in "tea" a warm beverage. As this was in reference to the Heaven's Gate leaders who went by Do and Ti, they would prefer the common version.
@@SunshowerWonderlab Not in the US at least. It's a regional variant almost certainly
Sounds like something done on purpose to bait people into commenting key words & boosting the video. Sounds cynical but it's one of THE top most recommended tricks among these content mill creators. Like, every article will tell new creators to do this for engagement. It's hell.
@@ERYN__ So... they named themselves after music terms.... without even knowing the first thing about music?
I cant even imagine how much easier it became for her after ChatGPT came to life
i've hated blair's sloppy work for 2 years, since im pretty knoweldgable on religious abuse and her video touching nrms/cults and mlms are horribly constructed, get facts wrong, and most of all a thing ive seen no one talk about: exploitative. She made sensationalized thumbnails with faces of real children that were really abused by a cult, to get clicks. and that is so abbhorent i dont have words
I started watching her for mlm information because she cited her sources and when I'd fact checked the information it had come back as verifiable.
And then a cult video autoplayed because I had to get a new phone. Immediately different- i noticed red flags and errors immediately.
She'd chosen some good sources to steal from like well-produced documentaries for mlms (which i had known very little about). But once the Legal Eagle nonsense happened i immediately knew something was wrong - i searched for other videos about this situation.
I recall being horrified at hearing how she stole private posts from communities that were recovering from MLMs.
The lack of empathy is only one thing - she chooses greed. She's literally a pyramid, it's disgusting that she believes her paycheck means consent or basic journalistic integrity doesn't matter.
Her videos about cults are why I stopped watching her. She couldn't be bothered to get basic things right, like claiming that the Jehovah's Witnesses believe in Hell. Not to mention that she is CONSTANTLY mispronouncing things.
You could apply the same to pretty much any YT video crying about "Cults"
I love the way she constantly triggers the far right into snowflake meldtowns lol.
@vivalarazausarmyvet4453
Not a single person who's actually on "the far right" gives a shit about her. Which you would know if you actually knew anything about what they believe. Pro tip, deciding what someone believes based on what people who hate them claim, is *really* dumb.
What I find the hardest to understand with this whole situation is the lack of passion. Every essay I’ve had to write for school, even if I hated the topic, I’ve managed to finagle some piece or angle I’m passionate about into it. The few essays I’ve only passingly been able to connect some passion into I absolutely hated writing. I just don’t understand how Blair can churn out all these essays (plagiarized or not) when she clearly has no passion for any of the topic, so much so she gets basic pronunciations wrong. Sure money is a factor, but I can’t imagine making 3 videos a week about something I don’t care about.
Then it means you should be proud of yourself, that's beautiful
while it must be miserable, it sure sounds better than a full work week for half the pay
A lot/most people spend most of their lives on jobs they don’t care about. I think the incentive for Blair isn’t to spend her work-time doing something she enjoys, but to make as much as she can with the least effort to maximize time she doesn’t have to work. I hope that sentence makes sense lol
@@VultureSkins It does, it’s just that we’re not talking about accounting or retail work, this is her own directed art, there is nobody bearing down on her to make crap
I feel like it's important to bring up that Illuminaughtii spent years on failed TH-cam channels that never developed a following before the video essay thing and Sad Milk took off. Your essays for school might have been filled with passion like Blaire's early stuff was, but you got a guarantee that someone would read your essay and give you a grade, Blaire didn't have that guarantee. So, imagine if you were in school and it was suggested that you could write an essay on anything you wanted, or not write an essay at all, but if you wrote an essay you could put it in a hat and maybe your teacher would pick up that essay, read it, and grade it.
You might have written 2 essays, or 20 essays, or just 1 essay, and managed to finagle some piece or angle you're passionate about into it, but how would you feel looking into that hat day after day seeing whatever you wrote just sit there. You'd either have to go hard into the "Well, at least I'm happy about it," mindset or you'd probably get pretty bitter about it, or you'd be really numb and apathetic towards it.
Then, imagine one day as a joke you write an essay like "Spongebob Squarepants: Secret Serial Killer," and THAT'S the essay that gets noticed and gets graded. After all of the work you put into every other essay you made, the only one that ever got noticed was the garbage you created in five minutes that was mostly sourced from a creepypasta you stumbled upon.
I imagine if that happened to you, but it was a video essay that made you thousands of dollars, your mindset would probably change pretty drastically.
This is probably the best iilluminaughtii related video I’ve ever seen. Everyone else is focusing on how she’s a shitty boss, friend, and overall human being- which is for sure important, but everyone takes for granted that her videos were popular and well liked.
This is the first person I’ve seen that acknowledges that she runs a content farm. Alongside her shitty candles, crypto farm, and attempts at making a company town, her main channel is just another soulless money grab.
However, since she did have a team of writers/editors i am still curious if it was her doing the plagiarizing herself or if she just instructed others to do it. I’m not sure which is worse.
Edit: for clarity’s sake, when I say “company town” I’m being a bit tongue in cheek, since what she was allegedly doing wasn’t exactly like a company town, but it was close enough that people would understand what I’m getting at and she has a history of videos talking about why company towns are horrible so it’s a bit two faced to turn around and pull this.
Check out Wonder and Ozmedia’s video responses to hear the whole of the allegations. The short of it, from what I understand, is that iiluminaughtii was trying to be a landlord for various friends/employees/coworkers. She wanted complete financial control over her inner circle, and perhaps even other employees since in her discord she would fantasize about buying everyone BMWs.
So not exactly a company town, but the end result is the same- a cycle of financial abuse. Take this with a grain of salt, since literally every allegation against Illuminaughtii is a ‘he said she said’.
People who worked for Illuminaughtti have stated that she's very hands-off, and that she doesn't even know what's going on with her own channel most of the time. Apparently, the team changed the outro, and Blair didn't notice for several videos.
I would imagine that Blair just hired shitty writers, since she has no idea how to do research or what good research is. Most of her team aren't good people either. They were the ones that invaded communities of MLM survivors to steal research without crediting them.
She ran a *WHAT?*
She attempted to make a fucking company town? What in the world?
Yeah huh? I never knew she tried to make a company town, dear gods!!!!
I’m sorry, a company town? That’s a pretty deep level of evil, if true. What’s the context?
she created videos with the same energy that I did when I wrote essays and made presentations in middle school when the project was due in 2 days, same energy but less actual research.
Right, like as I was watching this I was genuinely thinking about how my essays in high school (and even some early in college) were easily ~30% quotes by volume because I am a serial procrastinator and usually wrote all my essays the day before or even the day they were due, but even then I went through the extra effort to do my own research and tried to gain an understanding of what I was writing. From what I can tell, Blaire literally just opens up her recording software and sightreads documentary transcripts for an hour.
This ties in well with the Folding Ideas video on the Mikkelsen twins: he tries to write a 50k word nonfiction book in a month, and points out that synthesis research takes by far the most time, so you're going to be cutting corners like it's crunch time at the circle factory (that's a Zero Punctuation joke. I'm no plagiarist). Quoting is by far the least effort, so he realizes he should do as much of it as possible (the limit set by the method is 15% though). He points out that writing at this pace, on topics you're unfamiliar with, can only ever produce meaningless garbage. 2000 words per day is just too much to do any real research. So Blair saying "I write 3 4k words videos a week" makes sense. It's the same kind of pace, so the only way to not end up with boring, repetitive drivel is to either only write about stuff you're already an expert on (and I suspect anyone will quickly run out of things to say at 12000 words a week), or to rely on the writing of other people.
The worst thing is that _that_ video came out just before ChatGPT launched. The method he described required hiring a cheap gig economy ghost writing service to actually write the book for you for a too low price, but within a few months of that video releasing it became much faster, easier and cheaper to produce vacuous spam like that. The same goes for the illuminaughties of the world. This type of plagiarism is now even less work than it was, while also being more difficult to detect!
Good point!
I write as a huge part of my job and 4k words is about the max I can do in an 8 hour day. if I also had to record and edit a video on top of that, AND do it all 3 times a week I would be working 6 or 7 days a week for my entire life
point of order - blair has a TEAM of writers. she has a TEAM of researchers. and this doesn't absolve her of the relentless plagiarism and lies she slaps onto youtube with her stupid cartoon character; on the contrary, it makes it worse. the fact that her output is so consistently shitty despite having multiple people working on it indicates exactly what hbomb said in his primary video about plagiarism - blair does not give a FUCK about what she's talking about.
the amount of thought and effort you put into this comment is more than what blair puts into any of her videos.
Your numbers are off. He was writing a 25k word book, with a goal of doing 1000 words a day
This presumes that someone using ChatGPT to produce 4k word content every couple days as fast and cheap as possible is going to be able to either correct the content that ChatGPT disgorges (unlikely to even try), or to not be IMMEDIATELY noticed when she reads off ChatGPT completely fabricating content again. On top of the issues of the words it says making basic grammatic sense or flowing well, ChatGPT has no idea what is real, it just knows how to phrase something in a way that makes things sound plausible. This slams face-first into a wall the instant you show this to anyone who has even the *slightest* bit of knowledge about the actual subject matter. (See the Legal Eagle, appropriately enough, on that time a lawyer tried to use ChatGPT to make up case law to cite, didn't bother to check if it was real, and was immediately caught when the opposing lawyers and judge tried to look this mystery case law up and found it did not exist because OF COURSE THEY WOULD LOOK. I've also seen this personally in RPG forums - people try to do things like create monsters or characters for tabletop games like Pathfinder 1e, insert a prompt that includes a line banning content from D&D 5e, and then they post it, and everyone immediately points out that all the content is for 5e, because that's what ChatGPT was trained consuming content from.)
If you look at a lot of criticisms Blair has been getting from fans, it's been about factual inaccuracy about subjects they care about. Wikipedia may be *boring,* but at least it has a functional fact-check by all the people who use it, since errors are easily corrected which makes copy-pasting from it at least *safer* from a lazy writer's standpoint. Even if you dump the whole Wikipedia passage into ChatGPT, there's still no guarantee it won't do "AI" magic to throw weird nonsense into the script the way it keeps inventing or deleting fingers with photo editing, and of course anyone pulling this trick isn't going to take the time to check.
And yeah, she's totally wrong about stuff all the time, and people call her out a lot, but the important part is that it has to be only a SMALL portion of the audience who knows (and those who scroll down far enough in the comments to get to the frequently-downvoted corrections while ignoring the comments that always float to the top that are just "I love you, TH-camr!") If you get to the point where you're reading off things that are wrong from a "basic English sentence structure" level (and refusing to ever do a second take after noticing while recording), people will start rejecting the content outright en masse.
Try to imagine what a typical work week must’ve looked like when she was in her prime. She probably picked topics at the beginning of the week. She spent one day (at most) doing some light googling or watching a documentary and copy-pasting sections from webpages into a word document. The next day she sat in front of a microphone and read it all in one take. Sent it to the editing team. Maybe she reviewed the next upload or talked to her staff. Then she spent a few hours picking fights on Twitter. Rinse and repeat three times a week. What a weird life.
EDIT: it appears I expected too much. Looks like Blair *maybe* picked the topics and *at best* received a list of links/sources from her researcher which she then stitched together into a script and did not consistently watch her own videos to review for quality. It's entirely possible that the only work she did on a regular basis was reading the script. Take most of the work I imagined and replace it with picking fights on twitter.
That sounds like a dream honestly. Getting rich off no work and having a loyal following? And all I have to do is sell my soul! Sign me up!
You could probably do that all in one day..... Nice work if you can get it I suppose
I know she had at least one researcher on staff. I suspect what happens is that her researcher sends her the links and she knits a script from the sources. I don't even think she does the cursory googling and raiding of wikipedia.
@@TheCandystripedlegs paying a researcher to send you a link to Wikipedia because you can't be bothered to Google it is next-level laziness. I'm impressed
@@TheCandystripedlegsI agree with this assessment
Someone could unironically just clone her voice with AI and make this garbage and it would be identical to everything she's actually put out, it's insane
I mean tbh I have a feeling she'll do that herself. She just turns out garbage for adsense. I'm sure she's looked into AI automating basically everything for her.
Honestly the AI would flub its lines less
That’s hilarious, sounds like a great parody premise
@prisoner6266 you beat me to the joke 😆
if im being honest her voice sounds like the most generic, slightly raspy and fluid American voice that I have ever heard, definitely feels a little like ai already, cloning her voice wouldn't be hard for AI lol
what is so crazy to me is not even reading the whole wiki article for the stanford prison experiment… when i pretend to know about stuff, the criticisms and controversies sections are the first i go to. like give me the drama girl. Lazy Man’s Curiosity. i literally citation chased like this back when i was in high school to annoyingly correct my psych teacher. but she couldn’t even be bothered to do that! damn. indicative 😔
One of the things I've noticed from watching iiluminaughtii videos is that she tends to be terrible at coming to obvious conclusions and deducing. She sometimes relies on being perplexed instead of putting forth viable theories based on the information she has in front of her. I always found it slightly annoying. After her plagiarism was noticed and uncovered, it reframes it for me that because she lifted so much of her material, that she doesn't actually know much about the subjects she presents and therefore can't even begin to offer any original thoughts.
This. Or when diving into topics that require knowledge of another foundational topic/science, she'd just mention some keyword and go "haha idk what that is, I didn't check"... Ma'am, we're aware.
It wouldn't work as well. She has nothing unique to say so the conclusions she could offer would be boring, and non engaging. "ISNT IT CRAZY HOW ALL THAT FYRE FESTIVAL STUFF HAPPENED" gets you more comments than "People scam and that's normal and this was a bigger scam than usally that had lot more publicity to it than most scams"
I think part of the appeal her inability to give any insight ot conclusion gives the audience freedom to project their own interpretation onto it. Even more than on the original work she copied
@@Jo.j.13-l9v Your point is that plagiarizers, or at least iiluminaughtii, are more successful in leaving essays open-ended because they're wholely clueless about the subject matter than the people they stole the information from?
@manwright8679 His point seemed to me to be that an ignorant person presents information in a way that the fellow ignorant kind of prefer. Probably not consciously, but the limp, conclusion-less delivery is non-threatening to whatever opinions or impressions the ignorant audience has thought of. I would add the broader stroke that Blair's obvious weakness on the subject keeps any insecure people from feeling stupid next to her.
@@MoonShadowWolfe yeah, uh ...I don't like that precedent. It's dangerously close to "plagiarizers are good, actually." That's why I was asking them to clarify.
The degree to which she's used Wikipedia provides a really satisfying irony to the rant she went on on the Welsh Brothers podcast years ago. She was smugly mocking Cruel World Happy Mind, a much smaller anti MLM youtuber who was just starting out at the time, claiming she only cited like 4 sources for her video and the top one was Wikipedia. Then she continued by comparatively bragging how superior she was for regularly citing 20-40 sources in attachments to her videos.
And, of course, that whole issue started because Cruel World was alerted by a "friend" that it seemed iilluminaughtii had copied one of her recent videos, so she wrote Blair a very respectful message asking to discuss the issue. The message seemed to go ignored and forgotten for months until that podcast came out.
This is a very minor point, but I love how the intro music for Blair's first "Silent Hill/Centralia" vid uses music from the show "Goosebumps". Definitely adds to her vibe of putting as little effort as possible lol.
It's funni.
It was tripping me up, because MandaloreGaming uses the same music as the intro to his videos, and for a second I thought she was ripping him off, too.
I was WONDERING why part of my audio cortex was lighting up when I heard it! XD
As an ex Iilluminaughtii viewer, I watched her videos for the whole "exposing bad people" thing she did, as did many others. She couldn't have chosen a worse audience for when all this came to light, considering she spent so long telling people to never respect people who do such things. She carefully crafted her own demise to the point that it's actually impressive
craziest part is the illuminaughtii channel dosen't even post anymore
She also actively risked ruining a huge case against a large MLM company and risked setting up former members of the company to be retaliated against.
She really took off by making anti-MLM videos (a subgenre that has a whole community and activism around it) and then when she was accused of copying a smaller TH-camr's video she claimed she didn't even know there was a community and said she didn't consider herself a part of it and didn't want to be a part of it. This obviously pissed people off as she was the most prominent voice voice in anti-MLM content and there were various examples of this being an obvious lie. So there was a private Facebook group for former members of a big MLM company run by a few other anti-MLM TH-camrs that were organing videos and helping in the lawsuit going on. People on there were sharing their experiences and stories with the expectation that it was a private space. She sent one of her staff to join the Facebook group. The group said sorry we don't want anything to do with Blair and reject the request to join. They tried to join AGAIN and a mod who didn't know about the situation let them in and by the time the other mods noticed they had already gotten all the info from the group. The person in charge of group then reached out to Blair and asked her not to use the info and stories she'd gotten from the group in a video because of the lawsuit and that the company had been retaliating against people speaking out but she used the info anyway.
That's pretty messed up, god I wonder how she hasn't been deplatformed yet. Yet I'm not surprised since people like Shane Dawson and James Charles and Colleen are still on the platform so... Anyway what video was this in if you don't mind me asking?
So, not just lazy, but evil.
@@Randomaccountiswear th-cam.com/video/x04ssLoNs2g/w-d-xo.htmlsi=SEFiB_ooNL9t3s5g
@@Randomaccountiswear she's shadowbanned. better than nothing i suppose.
@@Randomaccountiswear I don't remember the name but I remember someone from the group talking about her experience around it. You can look her up if you'd like, her name is Savannah Marie and she talked about it with cruel world happy mind
It AMAZES ME that she thought she could recite the Fyre docs word for word and get away with it
This is kinda the thing that.. disturbs me a bit. Because she kinda did, no? If she flew a bit more under the radar and weren't an egomaniac, maybe Harris wouldn't have brought her up at all. This should be taken as a lesson applied to every single creator out there, atleast to me
citing sources: boring, hard and effortful
REciting sources: fast, easy and efficient!
@@siera2470yeah i only heard people talk about the plagiarism after she got into controversy for other unrelated things and then people starting to speak up about that too
honestly at this stage Hbomb is my gold standard for youtube essayists who discuss factual, research-able information. Provides examples, cites all his sources, *provides the sources* so you know he's not bullshitting you. every video is like a well-written research paper
@@starshard5754 also gotta shout out natalie wynn for citations, i like that she has them pop up in the corner whenever she's referencing something
She doesn’t need to make three videos a week. Nobody is making her do that.
It's simple, there's no passion. Her channel is clearly in a good state in which she makes money of, but she needs *more*.
It's all greed. It's all for profit.
Her ego compels her to do so.
@@lyndsay80 to be fair, I don't think she cares about her channel past it's ability to make her money. A youtuber- vangelinaskov I think- interviewed an employee of her's and she mentioned that she only noticed a change in her outro like 3 months after. It's actually just passionless money slop
@@kb4106the way she phrases it like she HAS to make thee videos for her viewers and i quote “for you guys” implies her ego is caught up in it and she’s soooo obligated to do so - there’s a layer of guilt tripping there
@@tlowery2074 yeah. I could see how she could be almost completely uninvolved and still be super egotistical about it. Sorry if my comment was rude- I struggle to understand people sometimes lol
her vocaloid video is what made me do a double take with her, but it was her response that cemented it. the vocaloid community reached out in good faith, and she attacked the people trying to spread their passion for this software. it was pretty bad
One thing, as a part time revisor for university student's papers, that I noticed that really gives away if someone is plagiarizing someone else is to pay attention to the adjectives and when and how they are used throughout the length of the production. Adjectives is the point where the author's opinions clearly leak through, even if they are trying to suppress it. If the usage seems inconsistent or a bit awkward, it's a strong indicator that it was plagiarized
although depending on your age/skill level/investment in the particular assignment etc you also might just be looking up various words in a thesaurus to pad word count lol...
Not exactly a reliable marker of plagiarism (bad writers do this too) but I can see how it would lead you to notice more red flags.
Fun Fact: If Blaire would do this plagiarism in a German university she’d be kicked out and won’t be able to attend any other german universities
If she did this shit in _any_ university she'd be kicked out instantly. Universities take plagiarism very seriously.
@@DreamyAileenyou can always go to Prager University
@@cpsbBXCX I see what you did there. We have a inside joke that Dennis Prager loves trans women because he talks about us so much in a way of obsession. Dennis poses himself as an authority but in the end he's a self-help book author and radio host. He has charisma I give that, but the gaslighting and bluster seem to only work on the 'working class people' with poor education.
"Fun fact: if this were a totally different situation a different thing would happen" ok thx
@@CormanToth Not the point. The point is that this sort of plagiaristic behavior is treated far more seriously by entities like universities than how TH-cam treats it.
I could never get over how often she badly misread quotes or mispronounced important words, but now I realise it’s because she doesn’t care about the subjects and probably didn’t even write them herself
In fact, she posted a video about Crumlin Road Gaol which she referred to for the whole video as “Gale” (not Crumlin Road Gail, just gale), and when everyone pointed out her mistake in the comments, she took down the video and announced it on Twitter like she was handing down punishment
No second takes!
She definitely isn't writing or researching them herself.
When this whole thing blew up in April, my fiancé said, "Oh yeah, I stopped watching her, someone just hands her a script."
She also says she has a team working for her, so they also most likely don't care and or tried their hardest for it to be enough
A funny thing is the part of these clips I hate the most are the only bits that actually coming from Illuminaughtii herself, which is the lil adlibs when she says something sassy and acts like she's 'spilling the tea.' The "which, you know, is fucking ridiculous" and "listen, I hate Autism Speaks" rub me the wrong way so bad.
They're such surface level statements said with so little authenticity behind them. It reminds me of react videos where a guy sits silently for 5 minutes and then says "dammnn, he showed them" or "woah, what was that?" in a monotone voice as if that commentary adds anything.
You're exactly right, and that started to put me off to her content after a while
And the fact that they’re completely empty. They’re glorified Barnum statements that can be applied to ANY topic she speaks about to give the illusion of actually caring.
The weird thing is that there were a few times that I saw Iilluminaughtii videos about stuff I already knew about, and everytime this happened, I was disappointed because there was a lot of "oversimplified" and "misunderstood" subject matter. And then I still never took the time to look into the other ones.
same! i originally subbed back in the day for the MLM videos, but unsubbed as i watched videos of subjects i was well-versed on, and could clearly see the messy research and unfamiliarity with the topics.
It's like someone gave her a list of bullet point arguments on a topic she has no fundamental understanding of. There's one video she made on a particular organization that I used to belong to, and while she did come to the conclusion that their practices are problematic, she only focused on minor sensationalist issues.
Video recommendation: "Gell-Mann Amnesia and Michio Kaku" by acollierastro
@@kaemincha yeah when she started producing non MLM content (or plagarising) is when i realized she didn't know anything and was a crappy researcher. amusingly she clearly does everything that she accused Cruel World Happy Mind of. which a lot of people were theorizing would be the case after the legal eagle drama.
@@clarkwhite998 was gonna mention gell-mann amnesia but you already did