Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Only Be Sure Always to Call It, Please, “Research.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet scramble age-old definitions of and ethical rules surrounding authorship, intellectual property, and plagiarism. As in the previous Bastiat’s Window column (“AI, Internet, and Rapid Advances in the Technology of Fraud”), this post was inspired in part by Jorge Luis Borges’s 1940 short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a quote from which appears in the graphic atop this piece. The title of today’s essay is cheerfully stolen from songwriter/satirist Tom Lehrer, who cheerfully stole from others and urged others to steal from him.

CHATGPT! GROK! CLAUDE!

Does a large percentage of output from and usage of AI platforms (e.g., ChatGPT, Grok, Claude) constitute plagiarism—and if so, is it feasible to define, detect, and prohibit what has long been considered intellectual property theft? Large-language-model (LLM) AI platforms scamper about the internet, gathering authors’ writings, and reconfiguring those borrowings into new documents for users. This raises two questions:

• Do they lift whole paragraphs or pages from existing texts and paraphrase them to evade plagiarism detectors? This would constitute paraphrase plagiarism.

• Are AI users presenting AI output as their own original work? This would constitute AI plagiarism—a problem so new that there’s no agreed-upon term or ethical standard governing its usage.

When I worked for a small newspaper in the 1970s, a local gadfly mailed in an unusually literate letter-to-the-editor. Asked by my editor whether he had written it, the guy said he merely copied part of a Barry Goldwater speech and mailed it in. The editor said we couldn’t publish it, and the guy demanded, “Why not? I agree with every word!” How might this little drama might play out today.

Let’s start with Goldwater’s most famous quote:

“Anyone who joins us in all sincerity, we welcome. Those, those who do not care for our cause, we don’t expect to enter our ranks in any case. And let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by unthinking and stupid labels. I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”