Optimist or pessimist on AI? The optimist has a kind of childlike sense of wonder, excited about the future of technology and the expanding utility of AI. The pessimist has a kind of depressed perception of disgust at the awful things in store and the false promises of AI's future value.
I'm depressed and frankly disgusted. When I see AI generate a fourteen-fingered man, it's like looking at a gnarly car accident. It's not at all like witnessing a young person improving their painting skill with a bright future ahead of them.
There's basically two types of plagiarism: the lazy plagiarism, and the malicious plagiarism. Academics with raised eyebrows who immediately detected my lack of true college credentials, please bear with me on this one.
When I was in school, I remember plagiarism only being the lazy type. The students had no energy to write a paper and no curiosity for the topic to motivate them, so they plagiarized. The laziness was in pasting entire sentences with no/few revisions and relying on too many verbose block quotes of text to fill up pages.
I was the second, but rare, kind of plagiarist: malicious. My paranoia at getting caught made me replace words with synonyms and rearrange sentences meticulously. Teachers expected my vocabulary to be higher than normal, so the lines between some academic writing and my own words got blurred. As such, I was never caught. And I never knew anyone plagiarizing like me who got caught, either.
Perhaps for selfish reasons, I value the malicious plagiarism over lazy plagiarism. There's more beauty in clever manipulation than in careless lies. The schmuck with the slick-back hair in a stupid suit promising a good ROI is more respectable than the stinky hobo talking with his hands but still trying to gaslight you into believing that he lost his arms in a war and needed money.
AI and plagiarism are siblings, like evil twins. Arguably, they're identical twins since large amounts of AI is plagiarized. AI's training data basically plagiarized by being scraped without attribution or transparency. But, let me explain how they're evil twins.
AI allows a lazy plagiarist to become a malicious plagiarist.
It's easier to use AI to write a paper for you than to plagiarize a paper directly and manually in a lazy way. And the maliciousness in replacing vocabulary/rearranging sentences can be done to the entire essay in seconds. Therefore, a lazy plagiarist can become a malicious plagiarist with no notable difference in time spent to cheat.
Compounded by a crisis in motivation in students stemming from COVID lockdowns, this is very bad.
Criminal justice is built on the consensus that premeditated criminals are worse than impulsive criminals. The guy knowingly breaking a law gets a harsher sentence than the guy who did so accidentally. I struggle to agree with this consensus. But more importantly, do we treat a criminal as impulsive or premeditated if their actions were impulsive but the effects of their actions resemble the deeper evil found in premeditation? For example, does a person impulsively robbing a bank get treated as premeditated if by sheer luck their face is hidden from every camera, they grab only the untraceable bills from the pile blindfolded, they accidentally open the door with their jacket sleeve leaving no prints because their jacket is too big, and about eighty other wacky forensic countermeasures occur?
I think we should put forehead tattoos on plagiarizing novelists and culturally enforce blacklists from creative professions. Yes, I'm thinking of getting a tattoo and writing more.
But, wait a minute, only creative writers were mentioned; I offered no solution for academic writers.
It's because the least popular creative writer has more readers than the average academic. A data point floating around is that half of all academic papers are not read by anyone other than their authors and those involved in publishing the paper, such as editors. In other words, your audience is bigger than an actual academic simply because your mom forwarded a copy of your email newsletter to a few of her friends.... and one of them pressed "subscribe" on accident, forever becoming a skimming victim to your smut.
Creative writers, therefore, hold immense social power and influence. A fellow academic plagiarizes your paper, nobody reads your paper... or theirs. A YouTuber plagiarizes your article, you more easily see millions of viewers get defrauded. Could this perhaps be why Gen Z said they wanted to be YouTubers when they grew up more often than scientists?
So, maybe a solution to all of this is to stop thinking of plagiarism as a problem teachers have with students, and instead see it as a problem society has with creatives. Next time an entertainer tells you ChatGPT wrote their joke for them, tell them you'll write their suicide note for them as a present. And the next time somebody tells you ChatGPT is a good conversationalist, laugh at their funny joke.
Plagiarism and You(Tube) - hbomberguy