In Britain we had a government that wholesale plagiarised works to create the so-called "Dodgy Dossier" - the basis of the case for going to war in Iraq in 2003 [1]

In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide.

The only thing more disgraceful than plagiarism is the arms-race and racket around "preventing" it with tools like the dubious "Turnitin" - dubious in its effectiveness, treatment of students work, privacy implications and the fact that students are compelled to use it, in most cases without prior formal agreement [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier

[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/anti-turnitin-scho...

I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment in particular of turnitin. I'm somewhat surprised by the copying of course notes though, as in my experience many academics take plagiarism extremely seriously, sometimes overzealously so, i.e. not use the same graph in two distinct works which is completely acceptable IMO.

> In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide.

Did you report it to the university? You should, the academics who do this, should be face consequences and in my experiences plagiarism is one of the few wrongdoings that gets relatively swift action, I suspect because it usually is very clearly unethical conduct.

> Did you report it to the university? You should, the academics who do this, should be face consequences and in my experiences plagiarism is one of the few wrongdoings that gets

Of course. But I have to tell you, they skilfully sidestepped it by blaming an firing a TA, who I happen to know was entirely innocent. The actual culprit is still a senior professor at that university. Things are always more complex in real life, as you know. The professor was also a PhD supervisor to a friend and we had to choose which battles to fight, rocking the boat would have had consequences far beyond my own vanity and sense of injustice.

Now I write regular pieces in the Times Higher Education. Having taught at dozens of universities as an international visiting professor I've got a wide and deep view of academia. In a nutshell it's run by gangsters and has a very, very high concentration of psychopaths (much higher than 'industry' I would say because there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from conseqences found in the world of real business)

> Of course. But I have to tell you, they skilfully sidestepped it by blaming an firing a TA, who I happen to know was entirely innocent. The actual culprit is still a senior professor at that university.

Would you or your friend still need to fear reprisals if you're naming names now? If not, given that normal channels have failed that all sounds sufficiently bad that at least naming the university and department might be worth considering.

> there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from conseqences found in the world of real business

Given your experience, I'd be very curious to hear what the main mechanisms your witnessed for side-stepping consequences for psychopathic behavior actually were. Since academia only involves spending other people's money without any direct test against outside reality, it stands to reason that it would be much more vulnerable to capture by colluding bad actors than business, where beyond a certain point of organizational pathology the money stops flowing in. There's of course also at least one mechanism designed specifically to cocoon people, namely tenure. But my guess would be that the main way it encourages the psychopaths is not so much that tenure protects them, but that having veto power over other people's tenure is a very good tool to enforce compliance.

> Would you or your friend still need to fear reprisals if you're naming names now? If not, given that normal channels have failed that all sounds sufficiently bad that at least naming the university and department might be worth considering.

Not really. It is bad. But I've grown thick skinned to it now. It's water under the bridge, and in the scheme of things, small fry. But if I was feeling vindictive I'd get lawyered up with a great libel advisor and write a book about some of the nonsense I've seen, or personally been party to in "academia"; including extraordinary sexism and constructive dismissal of women lecturers, a university that conned people out of their property, lots of crooked real-estate deals (many UK universities are foremost property developers who happen to do some teaching and research on the side), obvious bribes from industry on ICT contracts, blatant fraud on QAA audits, students who were deliberately led to catch Covid during the pandemic to save a few quid on housing allocation... I could go on all day, that's just a few things off the top of my head.

And I can speak freely about stuff that is already public. Just take a look at London Middlesex University and their record for shutting down whole departments on ideological grounds and turfing students who are still midway through studies out the door. It's cheaper to pay the compensation to the students who are brave enough to go through the months and years of formal complaints procedure. Academia is a well protected business.

> > there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from consequences found in the world of real business

> Given your experience, I'd be very curious to hear what the main mechanisms your witnessed for side-stepping consequences for psychopathic behaviour actually were.

This isn't the forum for deep discussion, or too much acidic denouncing, but I do suggest reading Ginsberg's "Fall of the Faculty" and some of Henry Giroux's work. Both would be labelled "shrill leftists", in a domain that ironically is already considered "too left liberal". However, that consideration of orthodox political spectrum strikes me as irrelevant in this age. What is the problem is the terrifying rate at which good people are being ousted, or taking early retirement, or jumping ship from quite senior academic posts to modest industry roles just to get away from the bullshit. Also terrifying is the rate at which real teaching and research is being set aside for cookie-cutter subsidised training for Big-Tech entry - a general decline in the intellectual quality of everything we teach. Even in traditional strong holdouts like Cambridge and Oxford I hear the same. I think we're in real crisis in the universities now.

Plus, for course notes that is just extremely lazy. The students who are paying for the course are almost certainly being cheated, if the instructor can't even write their own slides then I doubt the quality of instruction is very great either.

> the so-called "Dodgy Dossier"

One of my favorite movies of all time, In The Loop [1] deals with exactly that. It's extremely funny, and dark.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Loop

We had a maths lecturer who got us to buy their text book. Turns out the text book was just copy pasted sections from other maths textbooks in one book. Cost 30 quid, had the old page numbers and was therefore a confusing mess throughout.

My tutor then pointed me to a better maths textbook which was actually worth the money, shame I didn't know about that before!

OK, here is my unrelated plagiarism story... I was in high school waaaayyyy back in 1974, before the internet lads. I was in AP path and one class we had to take was a creative writing class, the assignment was to write a poem. I was completely stumped, so I copied the lyrics off the back of a Rick Wakeman Album (Journey to the center of the earth). The teacher said, "one student handed in the most fantastic work" then said my name asked me to read it in front of the class. I did, a few students caught on, but they did not rat me out because they said they were going to use the same idea themselves on the next assignment. I got an A, but it was a dufus move by a dumb kid.

I just don't understand today how anyone can think they could get away with plagiarism with computers and the internet etc.

Oh, they sure as heck are gonna get away with it, see this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/sharplm/status/1524024667576619008

Students are going to generate writing they didn't do with GPT-3

And teachers are going to use the discriminator part of a GAN to figure out if students did their own writing

OMG, so nothing ever changes, the game has just been upped is all!

But here is sort of the funny thing, as I have gotten older, I have grown to appreciate things like poetry a lot more and have even tried my hand at it a few times for fun.

I guess it just proves the old adage "retirement is wasted on the old and school is wasted on the young". Not sure who said that. I probably just committed plagiarism for not including an attribution. Sorry to whomever said it, wait, let me copy some Tracy Chapman Lyrics for the apology :)

I think you're thinking of "Sorry seems to be the long3st word " (c) Elvis John.

One kind of AI-enabled plagiarism that can be very difficult to detect is done by students who are writing in a second language. They copy-and-paste text from Wikipedia (or whatever) in their first language into DeepL or Google Translate and submit the output to their teachers as if it were their original work.

Teachers sometimes become suspicious because the students’ submitted texts contain many fewer grammatical errors and nonidiomatic expressions than the students’ speech or in-class writing. But it is hard to prove plagiarism if the teachers cannot do web searches in the students’ first language.

I did hear once, though, of a cut-and-paste MT translation being caught by a teacher because it included some large unique numbers, which did appear in a Google search.

A related issue that writing teachers are struggling to come to terms with is whether second-language writers are cheating when they use MT to translate texts that they originally wrote in their first language. Some teachers, especially in language-focused classes, believe that the use of MT hurts the students’ language acquisition and thus defeats one purpose of the writing assignments; they also think it is unfair to other students who struggle to write in the second language without the help of MT. Other teachers believe that writers should be allowed to use whatever tools are available to them as long as their content is original.

Really interesting question and I can see both sides.

After all, it's arguably only one step away from Grammarly correcting errors and otherwise fine-tuning your writing. I don't personally use it but I know people who swear by it. And presumably almost no one would consider that cheating.

Using GPT-3 is cheating, but it could be argued it's not "plagiarism" per se.

Plagiarism is copying someone else's work; using AI (or an essay farm manned by humans) is outsourcing the creation of a new thing.

Isn't it a grey line whether GPT-3 creates an original work or a derivative of potentially thousands of works?

There was the famous example where Copilot regenerated some John Carmack code verbatim with cussing comments, presumably because that code had been copied many times already.

Somewhere I read about GPT-3 committing clear plagiarism in English text, too, i.e. drawing way too much from one source and reproducing it.

AIs can’t have copyright. So it’s not even cheating. They just used tools is all. If the rules say you can’t use an AI (maybe spellcheck, depending how define AI and grammar check would be cheating), then it would be cheating.

I don't think the notion of copyright enters into it at all. Schools generally have policy to the effect that anything submitted must be the student's own work, not that another entity cannot have copyright over it. You couldn't submit out-of-copyright text without attribution, either.

What I’m saying is that AI can’t legally “own” text, thus it is legally your own creation.

As the parent said, plagiarism has very little to do with copyright or legalities. If a human essay farm assigns the copyright of what they've written to you--which is very common in a work for hire situation--it's still cheating in the eyes of pretty much any school.

ADDED: There is a degree of I know cheating when I see it. But, absent specific instructions to the contrary, spell checkers and grammar checkers/recommenders seem to fall pretty clearly into the assistive tools category whereas GPT-3 does not.

The author still had to write the prompt, edit it, etc. these are still skills that are (imho) more valuable than the writing itself. It is no more “assistive” than turning “waht” into “what”. In both cases the computer must infer what I mean and replace it with the appropriate string.

Legalities do matter here. The definition is “taking someone else’s work.” AI (currently) has no rights and no ownership. It is an “it” and not a “someone.” You are using a tool, an advanced tool that should be dealt with on a case by case basis. IOW, “don’t bring a graphing calculator.”

No, this does not enter into it at all. The universities set their assessment policies how they see reasonable, and will generally not allow auto-generated text. Just like it is not illegal to have a smartphone in an exam, but you can still be failed for it if it’s against the rules of the university.

Not to be tooo pedantic, but you agree spellcheck is against the rules? It’s “auto-generated text.”

But it appears we are on the same page. If it’s directly against the rules, that’s different (like bringing an advanced calculator to an elementary math exam). But it def isn’t plagiarism.

If you didn't create it, it isn't your creations. It's algorithmic output.

You can argue that it is no different than spell check and grammar check. It takes your inaccurately written text and turns it into accurate text. It doesn’t generate anything from thin air, so no. It isn’t “algorithmic output” unless we want to consider other tools as “algorithmic output” as well.

Spellcheck works (and often fails) at the level of individual words. Grammar checkers involve more extensive sets of relationships, typically at the level of a sentence, but are still limited to parts-of-speech agreement, relationships, tenses, and the like.

GPT-3 is constructing entire narratives from prompts. It operates at the level of multiple sentences and paragraphs, to the scope of an entire essay itself. Based on a provided prompt, it generates an essay.

By your same logic, an instructor assigning a class essay would be considered the author of those essays as that instructor had generated the prompt.

Moreover, as a matter of pedagogy, where a course either assigns group work (such that multiple students are contributing to an essay), or requires drafts and reviews with an instructor, TA, or other students as part of the overall essay-writing assignment, those become acknowledge parts of the process. In the case of the draft / review / revise cycle, it would seem that that is one way of putting a check on AI-generated essays, at least for now, as though generators can follow prompts, they're rather more limited in taking criticism well, and adapting to it.

> By your same logic, an instructor assigning a class essay would be considered the author of those essays as that instructor had generated the prompt.

Hol up, didn't you just describe academic research?! Sounds like we're on the right path here.

Plagiarism is at heart claiming as your own what isn't.

If it's somebody else's, give them credit.

If it's algorithm or automated output, say so.

There is an SNL skit about doing this

https://youtu.be/EWEX2jXSyFY

LOL, never saw that one, hahaha, I am sure I was not the first to do that and not the last :) would never work today with turnitin.com etc.

A few of us got away with it in the early 90's reciting Spin Doctors and Metallica lyrics. The trick was to use a deep cut. I don't think the teacher would have even recognized a radio single, but she may have picked up on all our poems being "verse verse chorus verse chorus"!

My class in middle school was 80% honor students - each and every one of their presentations was Wikipedia copied verbatim.

Looking at the results of the final exam it should have been at most 20%.

To this day I wonder what kind of upbringing they had that they felt the need to cut corners like that at such an early age.

There are tools to escape plagiarism detection: https://www.paraphraser.io/

For something that I knew would be challenging, I threw the first 4 lines of Howl at it and got:

Paraphrased:"I have seen the best hearts of my generation destroyed by madness and hysterically naked and hungry, Going through Negro Street at dawn, looking for a ferocious solution, An angel-headed hipster, burning on a machine at night, after an ancient celestial connection to a dynamo in the starry sky. In the supernatural darkness of a cold-water apartment floating on the roof of the city thinking of jazz, a poor, tattered, dented eye smoker"

Original:" I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz"

I was expecting basically thesaurus substitutions, and that is mainly what it did. However, there was some amount of sentence reordering as well. Not sure this would pass plagiarism detection tools though. However, I chose something specifically difficult to paraphrase, and honestly the results aren't bad.

"A prime number is a number that is only divisible by one and by itself." becomes "A prime number is a number that is divisible by just one."

I'd say, avoid.

It's like an arms race.

Another unrelated story:

A middle school classmate once turned in an article from Encarta as their essay for Social Studies. They didn’t copy paste the text… they literally printed the article, crossed out “Microsoft Encarta” with a pencil and then wrote their name at the top.

I was impressed with how little effort they put in. Teacher gave them an F of course.

I once graded an assignment handed in that still had hotlinks in blue underlined text from copy and pasting.

We used to rick roll teachers by pretending to copy paste from the internet by writing "Please click here for more information" somewhere in the text.

I haven't thought about that in about 15 years and just started laughing to myself about the time my English teacher was struggling to turn the volume off during study hall as Rick Astley sang almost the entire song at full volume.

In the 90s, I remember there being a piece of student work pinned to the public display board (this only happened to the best work). It had blue links in it. Either the teacher who marked and choose it had no clue what that meant or had no fucks to give, not sure which.

Thinking back to when I was a student I wonder - do you think your classmate thought they were being funny, or were they legitimately not considering the teacher would notice?

A lot of uni exams are bullshit because they're drafted by overworked and underpaid TAs and some (particularly undergrad) professors just don't give enough of a shit to really rewrite their exams.

I took a class on logistics as part of my major, and our course professor was rotating an exam he had given three years prior, with weirdly dated examples and all.

I've encountered this twice in my life. The first time it was during a midterm where I studied 100 problems in an obscure topic, and it so happen that the midterm was one such problem. The second was even more ridiculous, it was during a job interview where I googled "XYZ interview questions" for each technology listed in the job description. 95% of my questions were from the top 10 search results lol.

This happened to me. For my Ophthalmology paper, I reviewed all Multiple Choice Questions given at the end of a popular Ophthalmology text book. All multiple choice questions in the test were lifted verbatim from this section of the text book. I got a very good score on the test.