If the ratio of plagiarizing newbies is "most" then that would mean bots are becoming more prolific, no?    Surely, AI is becoming more and more sophisticated and making it more and more difficult to sort real humans from the fakes (harder to accomplish in-person, so far). 

I had noticed one regular thread that had around 10 pages within a few days of newbies spouting out repetitive bullshit nonsense, and surely distracting from the thread topic, and likely deterring real peeps from posting.  Likely this forum, and forums like this one, may also have to employ more and more bots to take on some of the work of identifying bot posts and perhaps banning those members and deleting their posts... yet probably part of the justification for the implementation of this merit system is to attempt to incentivize some of the members (including sources) to spot some of these bot posts, and perhaps, not to give merits to the bots.

Actually, there was one bot post that I recall seeing, and I was inclined to give it merit, because it was quite humorous - yet I hesitated to pull the merit sending trigger and waited for another post from the bot, which did not happen, and I did not send the clever post a merit... hahahahahaha