The Plagiarism Crisis Is Here

Earlier this month, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned after relentless stories accusing her of plagiarizing her doctoral dissertation and other scholarly works. Of course, the campaign against Gay had little to do with plagiarism. The President of Stanford also faced plagiarism accusations, but he received little to no attention from mainstream media. The racial dynamics at play are fairly obvious, but it was curious to see people up in arms about plagiarism not because they were passionate about transparency and honesty in creative work, but because it was a useful cudgel after Gay weathered charges of anti-Semitism (a charge also used by people who don’t actually care about the thing they claim to care about).

Except plagiarism is a real issue, and it goes far beyond the halls of academia. We are entering a world where plagiarism has become not only commonplace, but lucrative. Last month, I spent four hours watching “Plagiarism and You(Tube)”, a YouTube video essay by hbomberguy (aka Harry Brewis) going into clear instances of plagiarism by popular YouTubers like James Somerton and “iilluminaughtii.” What was fascinating about the video (aside from Brewis’ thoroughness) was how the incentives of the platform—YouTube—were clearly weighted towards to the plagiarists. There’s far more money in sloppily copying someone else’s work than in taking the time to do research and construct an argument. Plagiarist YouTube channels were clearly working off volume, siphoning work from smaller creators, lazily changing a word here and there, and then raking in the revenue until they were caught. At that point, they’d make a minor change (or simply excise a controversial bit regardless of how it impacted the rest of the video), maybe make a note in the description, and carry on like nothing had happened.

Plagiarism isn’t simply prevalent on YouTube; it’s everywhere on the Internet, and I would go so far as to say it’s thriving. The Internet is, for all intents and purposes, infinite space. You can’t reach the edge of it; it only keeps expanding and will accept anything and everything. If I ran a video store (and boy I sure would love to), it wouldn’t behoove me to put genuine movies next to their bootlegs; I’d want to save my valuable shelf space for the real thing. Perhaps if I was selling videos on a street corner, my business model would be flipped—only bootlegs at low prices, and hoping to stay one step ahead of the law. With its never-ending shelf space, the Internet makes no distinction between real and fake, and in a space that’s designed for quantity, plagiarists rush to fill the vacuum.

Look over at Amazon, where author Matt Singer discovered his recent book, Opposable Thumbs, sat on a digital storefront right next to an A.I. “summary.” After spending years researching and painstakingly writing this thoughtful nonfiction work, someone used A.I. to scan his book, regurgitate it poorly, create a fake author (“Shirley Miller” is a stock photo with a bio that doesn’t reflect “her” books), and profit. Singer reached out to Amazon to try and have this plagiarism de-listed, but to no avail. Amazon has infinite space, and money made by a fake book written by A.I. spends just as well as the money from the real book written by Singer.

Like YouTube, Amazon is more than content to take a hands-off approach on this issue, because there’s so little recourse available to original creators. Amazon is too big to successfully sue, and Miller doesn’t exist. Singer removing his book from Amazon only hurts him, so there’s now this weird space where a genuine book that’s terrific and a knockoff of that book have to sit side-by-side. For the author and publisher, it’s parasitic, but for Amazon, that relationship is symbiotic. They host the plagiarist, the plagiarist gets paid, and Amazon gets a slice of that revenue. It can’t hurt Amazon with publishers because Amazon is too big to cut out of any sales strategy.

Plagiarism is now central not only to individual tech behemoths like Amazon and YouTube/Google, but to the entire tech industry. OpenAI, the biggest AI company on the block, recently argued that it can’t have a viable product without copyrighted material. The way A.I. models work is that they scrape the Internet regardless of whether the material is protected or not, and spit something back out. Sarah Andersen, one of my favorite cartoonists, faced this problem when she discovered that A.I. was able to reproduce poor imitations of her comics even though she had never licensed that work for use. Simply by virtue of having that work on the Internet, A.I. companies felt entitled to steal it, and then put the plagiarized version to their own uses. Billions are pouring into A.I. companies, and while it’s nice to believe that A.I. is simply another tool, when the biggest A.I. company is saying, “Our plagiarism machine won’t work unless you plagiarize,” I doubt the benign benevolence of such a tool.

The downstream consequences are obvious. In November, Futurism caught Sports Illustrated publishing A.I. articles from fake authors. Last week, Sports Illustrated basically shuttered its publication by firing its writers and editors(fortunately for owner The Arena Group, they can still use the Sports Illustrated brand to sell brain pills). Layoffs across the journalism sector continue unabated. Billionaires who purchased major outlets continue to lose moneywhile no wealthy philanthropist seems particularly interested in backing local news and alt-weeklies that would have a meaningful impact both in their communities and for democracy as a whole. Why pay for journalists when there’s a plagiarism machine in the offing? Do you really need to report news when there’s a program that can scrape the Internet for a semblance of information? Like the original problem faced in “Plagiarism and You(Tube)” the ad dollars that come attached to lazy, plagiarized work spend just as well, and you can create far more plagiarized content at a faster pace than original reporting can earn.

I use these examples not to bum you out, but to stress that any reliable future of information will have less to do with “discovery” as the Internet fills with trash at an breakneck speed. That leaves room for smaller communities where you build trust with the creator rather than simply the creation. The words can be scaled, but talent can’t be, and so it becomes essential to find people you trust. Some may feel like this makes the Internet smaller, but I would counter that it brings back a sense of community. I harbor no ill will towards larger publications, but they’re trying to work on a scale that far surpasses any individual voice. They’re trying to fill the infinite space, but that only creates a lot of noise.

Can someone plagiarize a newsletter? Absolutely, but the costs won’t be worth it. The newsletter goes on, and you can either steal it verbatim or try to do crummy A.I. summaries, but neither will be worth the subscription fee. Plagiarism only seems to work at scale because of ad-based revenues. Back to my video store example, if it costs $5 to rent Barbie and $3 to rent Borbie, you’ll probably just pay the extra $2 to rent the real thing instead of $3 to rent the bootleg. 

Plagiarism is a serious issue, but it’s not one we’re helpless against. It will only take more rigor from both writers and readers to protect original work by paying for it rather than simply taking whatever an algorithm churns up. The good news is that when there is trust between readers and writers, it enriches both sides as opposed to the debasement caused by stealing someone else’s work and claiming it as your own.

Over on Decoding Everything

Dave is attending the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. I have a bit of jealousy because Sundance is a special place of discovery where you can get the word out about smaller movies and watch them take off when they reach a larger audience (e.g. Whiplash, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Past Lives). On the other hand, I’m currently in my robe and slippies instead of standing in a tent, so there’s that.

But Dave is trekking through the snow in Park City, Utah to see these new movies, and I’m making a note of the ones he likes so that I see them when they’re distributed. You should too!