Word Burglars

Plagiarism, Roger Kreuz tells us, is more than a plague spread by lazy or sloppy students. It is an accusation that has bedeviled figures across history: Margaret Mitchell and Mark Twain, Joe Biden and Melania Trump, Helen Keller and Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Putin. In Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, Kreuz combines history with psychology, exploring the manifestations, motivations, and consequences of plagiarism scandals.

Kreuz is the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor and an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis. He is the author or co-author of seven books that investigate issues of language and communication. He writes a monthly column for Psychology Today and is a frequent contributor to The Conversation.

He answered questions via email from Chapter 16.

Chapter 16: Like any college professor, I include warnings about plagiarism in my class syllabus. But Strikingly Similar paints “plagiarism” as a more complicated issue. What is plagiarism? Is it possible to have one suitable definition?

Roger Kreuz: Plagiarism is the deliberate appropriation of someone else’s words or ideas without acknowledgement or compensation. The problem with this term is that it has a very broad scope, including everything from neglecting to cite a source to the wholesale copying of another person’s prose. Students sometimes think that plagiarism just refers to the latter case, but it includes the former as well.

Chapter 16: Along the journey from “Chaucer to Chatbots,” did ideas about plagiarism evolve? Was there any specific moment when we adopted a modern idea of plagiarism?

Kreuz: Plagiarism was a recognized issue in ancient Rome and owes its name to the first-century Roman poet Martial. He complained about the unauthorized appropriation of his work, employing the Latin word that means “kidnapper” or “plunderer” to do so. This is where our term “plagiarism” comes from. But during the Middle Ages, the practice wasn’t perceived as problematic.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that modern notions of authorship and intellectual property arose. Interestingly, one of the figures responsible for this was Charles Dickens, who lost a fortune through piracy and unauthorized continuations of his stories. He lobbied for copyright protections in England and the U.S., and his efforts were ultimately successful, but it was a slow and gradual process.

Chapter 16: Accusations of plagiarism often serve as a political weapon. As you reviewed the many examples from American political history, what did you learn? Do these accusations affect politicians’ careers and the larger political scene?

Kreuz: In general, accusations of plagiarism don’t materially affect the arc of American political careers. The public may not see this as a serious transgression, or maybe it’s that we don’t expect high moral standards from our public servants. It didn’t keep Joe Biden, for example, from being re-elected as a senator, and then serving as vice president and as president. This isn’t universally true, however. In Germany, for example, three ministers who served in Angela Merkel’s cabinet were forced to resign due to plagiarism allegations. However, these individuals were appointed, and fairly or not they may be held to a higher standard than elected officials.

Chapter 16: How has technology shaped our understanding of plagiarism? Does the internet facilitate plagiarism, or does it catch plagiarizers?

Kreuz: The answer to all these questions is yes. We live in interesting times! Given the sheer amount of verbiage being published in print and online, it’s never been easier for plagiarists to escape detection. However, once someone falls under suspicion, it’s never been easier to prove an allegation of plagiarism.

Universities and publishers make use of so-called text-matching services, like Turnitin or iThenticate, and these return a score based upon matches found against a vast collection of previously published and unpublished material. Then it’s up to the professor or the editor to determine whether these matches are coincidental, inadvertent, or evidence of deliberate appropriation.

In the case of students, sloppy citation practices — such as neglecting to footnote a quotation — are a common issue. At some universities, students are encouraged to use text-matching services before they submit their final papers, just to make sure they haven’t committed plagiarism through sheer carelessness.

Chapter 16: You describe the prevalence of creative appropriation — for example, the millions of writers of Harry Potter fan fiction, or the sampling of tracks by hip hop artists. What is the line between appropriation and plagiarism?

Kreuz: It’s all in the eye of the beholder, unfortunately. In some cases, writers or artists whose goal is homage find that their sources of inspiration are flattered. In other cases, the result can be a lawsuit. It’s important to remember that while plagiarism itself is not illegal, copyright infringement certainly is. When such cases are litigated, it’s up to a judge or a jury to make a subjective evaluation about the intent of the defendant. These decisions have been all over the map and have often been reversed on appeal.

The legality of fan fiction remains a huge gray area for American jurisprudence. Such work can’t be traditionally published, but vast amounts of it exist online. Many authors are extremely protective of the characters and the worlds they’ve created and see fan fiction as a cheapening of their brand at best, or outright theft at worst. But the criteria used by courts to determine infringement — “fair use” and “transformative work” — have been applied inconsistently, and not many of these cases have been litigated.

Chapter 16: Now, in our classrooms, we see much less “traditional” plagiarism. It has been replaced by the use of AI programs such as ChatGPT. If a student uses AI to write their history essay, is it plagiarism?

Kreuz: Technically speaking, the student who allows generative AI to write their essay is engaging in ghostwriting, not plagiarism. Plagiarism presupposes that some “original” document exists to be copied, but chatbots — just like the roommate who wrote your paper for 50 bucks — generate de novo text on the fly. Whatever we choose to call it, the result is not the student’s own work and falls under the heading of academic misconduct. The problem is that neither humans nor text-matching services are good at detecting AI-generated writing, so proving such an allegation is problematic.

Many instructors are developing a more nuanced view of generative AI. Chatbots are a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. Chatbots are great for verifying facts — except when they hallucinate! — and for brainstorming. In my opinion, instructors should educate their students in how to use generative AI responsibly, since they’ll be expected to make use of it once they graduate. The AI genie isn’t going back into the bottle, and instructors need to redesign their methods of evaluation to adapt to a changed world.