Coffee professionals and brands are increasingly adopting generative AI. But should an industry that prides itself on authenticity and sustainability really be embracing such a destructive tool?
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A website is taking coffee content, running it through paraphrasing software, and reposting it without permission. The results are... interesting.
I read a lot of coffee news. For the past few years, once a week (at least) I comb through various websites to find the latest stories, announcements, ephemera, and nuggets of coffee nonsense. I thought I knew all the coffee websites worth knowing.
Then I found a new one.
Last week, while looking for some background information to accompany my interview with Cxffeeblack’s Bartholomew Jones, I searched “Cxffeeblack world tour”, expecting to find the Sprudge article I had read many times.
I’ve been using the search engine Ecosia for a while, and the results returned not only the Sprudge article I expected, but another article with the exact same title from a different website, Barista Speech (it also shows up on Google, albeit further down the first page):
That’s odd, I thought. I’ve never heard of this website. The headline is the same, word-for-word. If you didn’t know better, you might just click the first one that showed up—so that’s what I did.
At first glance, it looks just like any other coffee news website. Lots of links to other stories, a big header image, nothing out of the ordinary. (I don’t want to link directly to the website, so here’s an archived version of the article courtesy of the Wayback Machine.)
No byline, just an email (we’ll come back to that email).
But scroll down to the text, and it gets… odd.
It’s the same content, just strangely garbled. Like it’s been run through a paraphrasing tool (they exist, there’s lots of them).
So I looked at some of the other articles posted on the site (there are over 1,600). They’re all copied from other websites.
There does seem to be some consistency in the paraphrasing/plagiarizing. The word “coffee” is always swapped out for “espresso”—okay it’s a close enough word, even if it means something completely different.
Meanwhile, “construct-outs of espresso” in place of “build-outs of coffee” is genuinely quite funny.
And then there’s cold brew. Or “chilly brew” as Barista Speech would have it.
There’s 45 pages of chilly brew content.
Some of the paraphrased/plagiarized articles are almost poetic, in a mannered sort of a way. Take ‘For Chilly Brew, the HardTank Dispenser Launches on Agency Footing’, Barista Speech’s version of the Daily Coffee News article ‘For Cold Brew, the HardTank Dispenser Launches on Firm Footing’.
Hard Beans Coffee Roasters becomes Onerous Beans Espresso Roasters, which is great. On Barista Speech, the chilly brew device “stands a extra countertop-friendly two toes tall with a picket exterior case.” Two toes tall with a picket exterior case. Sounds like a song lyric.
(A side note: Daily Coffee News is referred to as ‘Day by day Espresso Information’ on Barista Speech. I don’t know if this is noteworthy, but I enjoyed it.)
They even have a Spanish language section, which appears to employ a similar copy/paste/paraphrase technique.
So the question is, why? Why go to all this trouble? Over 1,600 articles stolen from Sprudge, Daily Coffee News, Barista Magazine, HomeGrounds.co, as well as lots of reviews from Brian’s Coffee Spot and Above Average Coffee.
Interestingly, if a copied article had ads underneath it, as was the case with the Sprudge article on Cxffeeblack, those ads were copied as well with the original link intact. The site itself only has one original ad, seen in the screenshot further up, for something called Marketplace Colombia (again, here’s a Wayback Machine link).
Intrigued, I decided to investigate. Who is behind Barista Speech? And what is it for?
The “About Us” page is meaningless, mostly paraphrased from other websites like Restaurant Dive. Social media links went nowhere, and searching for “baristaspeech” on the usual social platforms turned up nothing useful.
Perhaps it’s worth investigating the one ad on the homepage, for Marketplace Colombia. There’s no information about the owners/operators on the website, just a Contact Us page.
According to its Crunchbase profile, Marketplace Colombia boasts “Colombian exotic products available for wholesale distribution in one place, whilst promoting local socio-economic growth”. The company’s website, meanwhile, seems to want to help launch coffee, cacao, and fashion businesses, which would somewhat explain the banner ad on BaristaSpeech.
The profile also lists a Giovanni Juliao as one of its founders. Remember the email byline from the Cxffeeblack article I first stumbled upon on BaristaSpeech, gjuliao32[at]gmail[dot]com?
Are the two websites connected? Time for some sleuthing! After a quick search on how to do this kind of thing, I began to look up information on Barista Speech. Hosting, IP addresses, WHOIS, that sort of thing. Nothing. The site uses a company called Domains By Proxy, LLC to shield its information, although it does say that the domain was registered in February of 2022. So at least we know it’s new.
Next I tried looking at the website’s source code for a Google Analytics or Google AdSense ID (thanks for the tip, DataJournalism.com!). Then, using a reverse adsense lookup I found a connection.
Both Barista Speech and Marketplace Colombia use the same Adsense ID, and that combined with the email/name similarities makes me pretty confident that the two are connected.
I emailed Juliao using that byline email to ask why Barista Speech was copying articles from other websites, running them through paraphrasing software, and reposting them.
Juliao replied quite quickly, referring to Marketplace Colombia as “a happy sponsor” whose agreement is coming to an end, and responding to my concerns with, “As for the articles yes they have full permission, as they are open API’s.”
I wrote back asking if Barista Speech had written permission from the various websites, because they all quite clearly state their intellectual ownership of their content.
Juliao replied: “While content runs through some specific API, you are allowed to use that content. Else you can’t. So I only use content from the API.” When I asked for clarification on what he meant by API, he sent me a link to a Feedspot RSS feed on coffee which did not answer my question.
When I asked for further clarification, as well as whether he still had ownership over Marketplace Colombia—the website that shares a Google Adsense ID with Barista Speech, and of which he is listed as a founder—he didn’t reply.
While all this seems quite harmless on the face of it, even funny when the weird paraphrased plagiarism is taken into account, ultimately Barista Speech is taking other websites’ content and passing it off as its own in order to advertise a linked company.
I reached out to my contacts at a few of the affected websites, asking for their thoughts on Barista Speech—turns out this sort of thing is disappointingly common.
Daily Coffee News declined to comment. Sprudge, however, sent me this statement from co-founder Jordan Michelman: “In the pantheon of websites that openly knock off Sprudge, this one is at least funny and interesting. 'Construct-Outs of Espresso' is arguably a better name than Build-Outs of Coffee. In 2023 expect us to update our feature series in light of this fact.”
Brian Williams of Brian’s Coffee Spot was more blunt, saying “It's theft, and I resent my work being stolen.”
Which is correct. The one thing Barista Speech has going for it is its oddly poetic plagiarization style, which at the very least is amusing. How long it will still be copying/pasting other coffee websites’ content is hard to know. As of publication the site is still up.
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