SAN FRANCISCO, CA—A bay area high school senior was reportedly outraged on finding the essay that won the statewide essay contest had been ostensibly plagiarized from an essay he had claimed ownership of, though on further investigation reporters found the outraged student had himself plagiarized his own essay from an unsuspecting and reserved alumnus of a neighboring high school.

Sam Faultymangioni, a below-average student, admittedly hates going to class and would rather “play video games, troll online forums, do online hacking, and wildly masturbate.” Proclivities notwithstanding, Faultymangioni sent a strongly ChatGPT-worded letter to the administration of Bayside Polytechnic High School, as he suspected foul play when he had noticed a fellow student’s English 102 essay had contained full paragraphs lifted from an essay he himself had written for a similar class the semester prior. 

Faultymangioni said the essay was brought to his attention when the teacher used it as an example of a “pretty good” essay.

Faultymangioni told administrators he was outraged, felt “robbed” of his original ideas and unique perspective, and that it was “unfair,” noting the fellow student’s paper had not only won the first prize in the statewide Skyward Bound Essay Contest, but the submission had also earned its author a full-ride scholarship to Stanford University. 

The award-winning essay, authored by foreign exchange student Tai Snatchi Fong Yiu of Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, was said in its abstract to cover topics ranging from “AI in science fiction and television to large language models (LLMs), and possible use cases in business contexts.” Lauded by the Admissions Department as well as the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, Tai Snatchi Fong Yiu’s work was described as being “grounded squarely in reality with a perceptive understanding of current events” and “forward-thinking,” though it’s notable that the essay contained no genuine study of programming concepts.

“It’s unfair,” Faultymangioni wrote in his complaint to the administration. “I wrote that essay and I should be the one going to Stanford!” He added, without evidence, that Tai Snatchi Fong Yiu himself may pose a national security threat, due to Fong Yiu’s status as a foreign exchange student from China. The Trump Administration has reportedly already “looked into” deporting Fong Yiu to his native China.

Reporters for The Thirsty Thespian have worked alongside The Thirsty Thespian, Inc.’s legal, information security, and forensic linguistics teams to investigate both essays and can certify that the essay in question has indeed featured plagiarized sections, although it has also put forth new ideas, and our teams can estimate that the newer essay is 20% better in quality than the so-called original.

However, on further investigation, we found that Faultymangioni’s essay, as well as Tai Snatchi Fong Yiu’s essay, had been recycled from another student, David G.K. Burrows, who had himself graduated from a neighboring school, Bayside School of the Arts, a year prior and was now studying literature and film at the University of California, Irvine.

Upon forensic analysis, G.K. Burrows’s essay was determined to be 100% authentic, and our team was therefore able to determine that Faultymangioni had indeed plagiarized G.K. Burrows, while Fong Yiu had plagiarized Faultymangioni’s plagiarism. It should be noted, too, that our forensic team also viewed G.K. Burrows’s original draft as being 175% higher in quality. 

When confronted about their own academic impropriety, Sam Faultymangioni, who plagiarized David G.K. Burrows’s essay, burst into tears. “It’s not fair! This Tai Snatchi Fong Yiu person… stole my idea. It was my idea to rip off David’s essay first. Why should he get the credit for it?

Tai Snatchi Fong Yiu, meanwhile, was less bothered, shrugging the whole incident off. “You win some, you lose some,” Fong Yiu said, adding, “Isn’t that what all you Americans do? Soda companies ripping off soda companies, burger companies ripping off burger companies (and even Taco companies that rip off other cultures, make it inauthentic and unquestionably worse, will start ripping off burger joints too).” 

Finally, Stanford University, who had previously offered Tai Snatchi Fong Yiu a full-ride scholarship under false pretenses, when contacted by TTT reporters, had, to our surprise, left Fong Yiu’s deal in place. When asked why, its admissions director said that, “While Fong Yiu had shown some academic impropriety, he had lived under the ubiquitous mantras shared by anyone from tech company entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elizabeth Holmes to journalists like Jayson Blair: Fake it until you make it, Move fast and break stuff.

At press time, we asked the three students of a recent event that bore a resemblance to their own situation—asking their thoughts about the outcrying of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who claimed rival Chinese AI company DeepSeek may have inappropriately used its data to build its AI models. 

G.K. Burrows, the original essay’s author, shook his head and rolled his eye, noting, “It’s rich of Sam Altman to get mad about a rival plagiarism machine developer stealing from OpenAI to build a slightly less shitty plagiarism machine. He has no recourse. It’s like trying to report being mugged after you yourself robbed a store, wherein reporting the mugging would implicate yourself in the robbery.”

Sam Faultymangioni, meanwhile, was unsurprisingly sympathetic of Altman—having himself plagiarized G.K. Burrows’s essay, only outraged that Tai Snatchi Fong Yiu (a fellow plagiarist) had thought to submit his plagiarized work for recognition. And finally, plagiarist and incoming Stanford University student Tai Snatchi Fong Yiu laughed. “What a little bitch” (describing Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI). 

-TTT.