Plagiarism, AI, and Effort

 

Posting this video not necessarily to tut about these particular accusations (though it's sad to see the Internet Historian is involved; I've enjoyed his content), but for one of the quotes from Jonathan Bailey, the plagiarism expert and author at Plagiarismtoday.com.

He hits on a particularly good point concerning plagiarism reducing writing quality:

"The plagiarism wasn’t just copy and paste plagiarism. [The author] went through and attempted to edit a lot of the words and rewrite things to make it more his own, supposedly. And the result of that type of editing is always just poor-quality writing."

He then takes it a step further, comparing the poor-quality writing to that produced by AI:

"And interestingly, this is a lot of what generative AI does, because generative AI does not necessarily understand what it’s writing, it’s just taking what it reads and gathers from the Internet and then tries to rewrite it cobbled together in a way that’s cohesive and understandable to people. So if you’re wondering why AI writing is not the best in the world, it’s the same reason this type of plagiarism produces very bad writing."

These bits come in at about 10 minutes into the video.

None of this, of course, will stop my students from plagiarizing. The utility, the reward without the work, is still very tempting. Not that I have a lot of students plagiarize -- what I see mostly is inadvertent, not on purpose, and once I point it out, they're quick to self-regulate and make things better. AI just adds another wrinkle in the writing utility train that's going to have to make us work harder.

And it all causes me to think about my own writing.

I don't want it to be boring. So I've got to try harder.

Harry Brewis, who produced the video Bailey discusses, has this to say in an interview at Vulture.com (emphasis mine):

"Now that people are aware that you can just make a computer write something, I think they’re going to raise their standards. As soon as I started asking myself, “Am I just watching trash a computer spat out?” a lot of YouTubers I used to watch became boring to me. I thought, This is interchangeable. Even if a person wrote it, I hate this. Ninety percent of everything has always been bad. And the fact that we now have to think about what we’re watching and if it’s bad in this very active way, people will be more discerning about what they enjoy. We used to live in a time when there were three channels. If you wanted to watch something, you had to buy it on DVD or you had to go through the effort of stealing it from a torrent site and finding one that wasn’t a virus. But now, it’s convenient to just keep watching anything forever. We hit that stage seamlessly without having a moment of stopping to assess the quality of what we do with that time. It used to be, you’d watch an entire anime, and then you’d have to do work to find what you’d follow it up with. Now, if you have Crunchyroll, there’s 500 million episodes and you can just keep going forever. It’s much harder to stop and reassess. In a way, the badness is so omnipresent now, people will have to actually rethink their practices in a way that is maybe better than what we had before."

There is a lot of bad stuff out there, professinally edited, mainstream published bad stuff. I don't want what I write to be bad. That's going to take effort, and that's not what most content creators want to hear these days. Effort is hard. It's long. It doesn't pay off in a span of days or weeks, but often months and years. I need to get back on the writing track and make my stuff stand out, in a good way.