The Past and Future of Plagiarism

A wholly original Middlebrow.

Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned her position at the start of the year, caught between a vise of criticism for her handling of student protests around Israel's war with Hamas and a persistent plagiarism scandal, the latter of which had been unearthed and publicized by people angry about Gay's handling of the former. The Middlebrow will leave Harvard's business to Harvard, Gay's business to Gay and the subject of Israel alone entirely.

We know that in politics, plagiarism is not always deadly. Joe Biden was credibly accused earlier in his career, but that's largely forgotten. Melania Trump ripped off a speech from Michelle Obama and Donald joked about it, calling the press hypocrites for criticizing his wife for delivering the "exact same speech" they had previously praised.

In book publishing, academics, and stand-up comedy, where ideas are currency because money and prestige are scarce, the consequences are worse.  Get accused of theft in those venues and you might find yourself not only fired, but blacklisted. In these fields, where originality is rewarded and where people have to fight to be credited for their original insights, plagiarism is the worst form of theft.

“I wonder why so many people suddenly care about the citations in my specialized work from decades ago? Did The Rock retweet me or something”

But this wasn't always true. Consider Homer, who wasn't the "author" of the Iliad and the Odyssey but was the bard that history managed to remember who had memorized and probably extemporized these stories, which he then told in group settings. The value of his contribution wasn't that he made up his stories and hymns, but that he brought them to life and imbued them with personality. There were other bards, all telling stories, sometimes the same ones. No doubt, there were conflicts among the bards about stealing each other's bits, that's just how people are. Like in contemporary pop music, the value here is in the expression, not the originality, of the ideas.

William Shakespeare borrowed heavily from folklore and Plutarch to construct the plots for many of his best plays. So did his contemporaries. In Elizabethan England, books were hard to get and literacy was hard to find. The dramatization of these stories was the only reliable way to spread them to large audiences. I learned only last year, by reading Big Fiction, which I selected as my favorite book of 2023 for the Washington Independent Review of Books that reading didn't become an ordinary leisure activity in the United States until the 20th century, and most of that popularization came after World War II. Plagiarism is a most serious sin in societies where writing is highly valued.

Well, we know that original writing is still valued in universities and by book publishers and in comedy clubs. But how much do we really value writing, as a society? We let politicians and "thought leaders" and business leaders steal from each other all the time and when they aren't cribbing one another they are often speaking in cliches, which is like plagiarizing our collective memory.

We are also spending billions to develop software that plagiarizes from all of us so that individuals can plagiarize from it, and we call it "Artificial Intelligence." There is, at least, some irony that we will cite plagiarism to drive a school administrator out of office while at the same time celebrating the advancement of software that reads everything ever published anywhere for the express purpose of regurgitating the ideas and calling them original. The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for "training" its software on writing that the Times published and owns -- I doubt this will do much to slow down the spread of AI, but if we are going to value the creators and owners of writing and the ideas conveyed, it's a fight worth having.

I also wonder how many people indulging schadenfreude over the Harvard fracas will find themselves, in the mists of time, borrowing phrases and ideas from a chatbot, without regard to where their virtual muse sourced any of it in the first place.

In practice, I'd caution that plagiarism tends to apply to people opportunistically. Claudine Gay started out a target for her race and gender, she drew more attention and criticism over her handling of reactions to the most divisive issues in western global politics, and then her critics combined to use plagiarism as a finishing move. When such vulnerabilities and vitriol fail to coalesce, people mostly don't care.