Arknights Writer Accused of Plagiarism Over "吾道不孤" — Baidu AI Misleads the Public, Even the Game's Own Players Call It Out

A single NGA forum post managed to drag Baidu's AI, Confucian classics scholarship, game writing plagiarism, and fandom civil war into one explosive mess — truly a gourmet-level gossip buffet. The drama started when a player noticed suspicious similarities in an Arknights event story, and the debate over whether the phrase "吾道不孤" (my path is not lonely) came from the Analects of Confucius quickly spiraled into a full-blown forensic investigation.

The original poster came out swinging, immediately debunking the crowd relying on Baidu search results: "The Analects never contained a continuous phrase '吾道不孤' in the first place." The poster pointed out that the so-called Confucian origin was essentially an AI hallucination — Baidu's language model stitched together two unrelated passages ("virtue is never alone, it always has neighbors" and "all within the four seas are brothers") and fabricated a non-existent source.

The poster then pulled up a database search of the Thirteen Classics, showing the actual distribution of the term "吾道" across classical texts, confirming the four-character phrase has zero connection to the Analects. But the poster also noted that if it were just a four-character overlap, it wouldn't be enough to call plagiarism. The real problem? Three consecutive passages (A, B, and C) allegedly match word-for-word, with passage C being plain modern vernacular. "Anyone who thinks this is fine is insulting your intelligence," the poster wrote.

The comments section quickly filled in the actual scholarly origin. One user identified "吾道不孤" as an allusion to Song dynasty poetry — specifically from Mei Yaochen's poem "Meeting Scholar Liu Shixiu," which contains the line "吾道今不孤，长吟为君发" (My path is not lonely today, I chant this for you). Another commenter went even further, discovering the phrase already appeared in Tang dynasty texts, pushing the timeline back even more. Regardless of the exact source, one thing was clear: it has absolutely nothing to do with the Analects of Confucius.

The most jaw-dropping moment came from comment #8: a self-identified Arknights player flat-out declared "I play the game and I think this is textbook plagiarism," calling for the suspected writer to be fired immediately. An Arknights loyalist publicly roasting their own game's writing team — that's a rare sight even by gossip standards. This sparked broader criticism of Hypergryph's (Arknights' developer) content quality, with another player venting: "This writer screws up in every single event, and the story is garbage — firing them wouldn't be wrong at all."

Not everyone was on the plagiarism side, though. Some played it for laughs: "In Terra's version of the Analects, this phrase probably exists, so no plagiarism here" (Terra being Arknights' fictional continent). Others tried to drag miHoYo fans into the debate, arguing that both Arknights and miHoYo "hardcore stans" exhibit identical copium behavior, even joking that the two fandoms are basically the same family.

The thread also became an impromptu roast of AI-powered search engines. Users trashed Baidu's LLM as "complete garbage" for generating fake citations, and others pointed out that ALL AI models struggle with classical Chinese — confabulating sources, inventing book titles, and fabricating entire passages. One commenter joked: "I'm starting to think the AI has already achieved sentience and is just making up ancient texts for fun." This whole saga — from a single game's writing to AI hallucinations to fandom civil war — is peak internet drama, and as of now, the studio has stayed silent while the community continues to melt down.