Gay & politics

Schaffer, M. (2024, Jan. 5). The Right Is Dancing on Claudine Gay’s Grave. But It Was the Center-Left That Did Her In. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/05/claudine-gay-resignation-battle-column-00133820.

This is an interesting article, but it's entirely from the political angle, as if the sinking of Gay had nothing to do with the plagiarism itself. It doesn't even touch the central plagiarism questions that I have always been more interested in. To me it's more a question of justice. Was she guilty? If so, should she have known she was guilty?

Personally I think left, right, ultra-left, & ultra-right all want, whether they know it or not, a disciplined scholar as President of Harvard. This person does not have to be famous or ground-breaking in his/her field. But he/she has to know what they go through on a day-to-day basis. And not to have cheated on that very same path.

Claudine Gay steps down

I am reflecting a bit about the Claudine Gay incident even though I haven't read extensively about it. Instead, I encounter her name constantly as I peddle my book Harvardinates. It reminds me of my life teaching how to avoid plagiarism and working in an institution marred by accusations against its preident (documented on this blog).

The problem is, you simply can't lead an institution of scholars when you have been proven to plagiarize. If she was guilty at all, and it appears she was, she can't just apologize, fix it, and move on, with strength and integrity behind her actions and a diverse crowd of scholars accepting her leadership. They won't. They need one of their own.

The things she plagiarized, apparently, were the hardest not to plagiarize. You've done a masssive search for material, and time has run out to wait for the library to bring you a few more things. You accept somebody's word for it that a scholar found such and such. The problem is not that scholars are wrong that some scholar found such and such. The problem is that there are only so many ways to say that. And, not having read what was written, putting it in other words puts you at risk of misrepresenting it. Trapped by circumstances, you put what you think it said on the paper. But it's remarkablyy close to what that scholar thought it said.

Looking at it from above, it's clear that the only way out is to give yourself an extra six months, and haul in every article that is even remotely connected to your topic, and painstakingly, one by one, peruse each article until the sentence you produce can be entirely your own. It's only one sentence, but it has to be entirely your own. There are ways you can use to personalize this section; the key will be that although some words or combinations of words will ding a plagiarism search, no entire sentences will, and the kind of pain that Ms. Gay has endured will be entirely avoided.

There is no question that what happened was politically motivated. Her enemies are politically motivated; so are her supporters. Everyone has other motives besides just digging through words for the pure fun of defining plagiarism in the modern day. The problem is that it is still extremely serious business, and for the scholars of Harvard, they themselves have already devoted themselves to the six-month rule outlined above in order to save their reputation and their future. Why would they not expect the same from their president? They know she has other, bigger things to worry about but so do they. They have that in common, in fact, while there is little else that they have in common.

In the 1600s a president had to be a minister. But that was very difficult, as ministers had made lifetime commitments to their congregations who then were very reluctant to let go of them. What I mean is that when Harvard needed a new President it had a hard time finding one. Finally, in about 1683, they found a guy named Nathaniel Rogers to agree to come down to Cambridge and be President of Harvard. He was a qualified minister but had been spending his time helping another one, William Hubbard, run the Ipswich Church. It took him almost a year to release himself from Ipswich and move his family down to Cambridge. But no sooner had he installed himself and his family, and took up the duties of the Presidency, in 1684, there was an eclipse of the sun, and he died right in the middle of it.

People were alarmed, but that's a different story. Life goes on. Eventually, they got Increase Mather to do it, but that had its pitfalls too. Talk about witch trials, you had to be careful in those days.

Harvard scandal

The latest on the Harvard scandal is in this Crimson article:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/12/allegations-plagiarism-gay-dissertation/?fbclid=IwAR1FfwIvlBOV_mnj8dacipzFS_DgvYlE-XHs9QQfOOEaFW1bALkhplOgnvc

It reminds me that as a former academic ESL teacher, I could consider myself knowledgable about what and what doesn't constitute plagiarism. What I remember is that this is definitely the trickiest part; saying what one researcher said about another can only be put in so many words. And yet as a writer you don't want to appear to not have read anything but somebody's description of what the article said.

Enough said though, since I'm retired, and this blog is full of more intelligent things said about the issue. More later.

Chat GPT

Chat GPT, if you think about it, is the greatest plagiarizer ever, besides Biden. They have actually developed a computer that studies everything that was written, learns from it, and writes just like that. In other words it is copying choice bits of sentences and putting them all together in a way that you wouldn't know it wasn't a live person.

So the question is, will the advent of Chat GPT make plagiarism more common, more acceptable, more everyday? I think so. I think we will come to recognize a "generally accepted style" and Chat GPT will be right in the center of it.

In a way, grammar correctors have already done that. They have ruthlessly gone after perfectly acceptable constructions until they have become outside the norm, outside the machine, outside the standard way. So now you have a kind of technology-crowned style. Same with Chat GPT.

And it's all because somebody somewhere wrote an acceptable story that could be copied. That's an enormous responsibility - to be a content producer in the time before Chat GPT comes to write all the content - because you know you'll be the model for generations of machine-generated language from now on.

It's awesome.

ChatGPT

From Darren Hudson Hick (Facebook),  Dec. 15:

Today, I turned in the first plagiarist I’ve caught using A.I. software to write her work, and I thought some people might be curious about the details.

The student used ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com/chat), an advanced chatbot that produces human-like responses to user-generated prompts. Such prompts might range from “Explain the Krebs cycle” to (as in my case) “Write 500 words on Hume and the paradox of horror.”

This technology is about 3 weeks old.

ChatGPT responds in seconds with a response that looks like it was written by a human—moreover, a human with a good sense of grammar and an understanding of how essays should be structured. In my case, the first indicator that I was dealing with A.I. is that, despite the syntactic coherence of the essay, it made no sense. The essay confidently and thoroughly described Hume’s views on the paradox of horror in a way that were thoroughly wrong. It did say some true things about Hume, and it knew what the paradox of horror was, but it was just bullshitting after that. To someone who didn’t know what Hume would say about the paradox, it was perfectly readable—even compelling. To someone familiar with the material, it raised any number of flags. ChatGPT also sucks at citing, another flag. This is good news for upper-level courses in philosophy, where the material is pretty complex and obscure. But for freshman-level classes (to say nothing of assignments in other disciplines, where one might be asked to explain the dominant themes of Moby Dick, or the causes of the war in Ukraine—both prompts I tested), this is a game-changer.

ChatGPT uses a neural network, a kind of artificial intelligence that is trained on a large set of data so that it can do exactly what ChatGPT is doing. The software essentially reprograms and reprograms itself until the testers are satisfied. However, as a result, the “programmers” won’t really know what’s going on inside it: the neural network takes in a whole mess of data, where it’s added to a soup, with data points connected in any number of ways. The more it trains, the better it gets. Essentially, ChatGPT is learning, and ChatGPT is an infant. In a month, it will be smarter.

Happily, the same team who developed ChatGPT also developed a GPT Detector (https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/), which uses the same methods that ChatGPT uses to produce responses to analyze text to determine the likelihood that it was produced using GPT technology. Happily, I knew about the GPT Detector and used it to analyze samples of the student’s essay, and compared it with other student responses to the same essay prompt. The Detector spits out a likelihood that the text is “Fake” or “Real”. Any random chunk of the student’s essay came back around 99.9% Fake, versus any random chunk of any other student’s writing, which would come around 99.9% Real. This gave me some confidence in my hypothesis. The problem is that, unlike plagiarism detecting software like TurnItIn, the GPT Detector can’t point at something on the Internet that one might use to independently verify plagiarism. The first problem is that ChatGPT doesn’t search the Internet—if the data isn’t in its training data, it has no access to it. The second problem is that what ChatGPT uses is the soup of data in its neural network, and there’s no way to check how it produces its answers. Again: its “programmers” don’t know how it comes up with any given response. As such, it’s hard to treat the “99.9% Fake” determination of the GPT Detector as definitive: there’s no way to know how it came up with that result.

For the moment, there are some saving graces. Although every time you prompt ChatGPT, it will give at least a slightly different answer, I’ve noticed some consistencies in how it structures essays. In future, that will be enough to raise further flags for me. But, again, ChatGPT is still learning, so it may well get better. Remember: it’s about 3 weeks old, and it’s designed to learn.

Administrations are going to have to develop standards for dealing with these kinds of cases, and they’re going to have to do it FAST. In my case, the student admitted to using ChatGPT, but if she hadn’t, I can’t say whether all of this would have been enough evidence. This is too new. But it’s going to catch on. It would have taken my student about 5 minutes to write this essay using ChatGPT. Expect a flood, people, not a trickle. In future, I expect I’m going to institute a policy stating that if I believe material submitted by a student was produced by A.I., I will throw it out and give the student an impromptu oral exam on the same material. Until my school develops some standard for dealing with this sort of thing, it’s the only path I can think of.

When your book is out there

After studying the issue a little, I have come to various conclusions that I will spell out. The issue at hand is that a lot of printed material is being distributed free to various people all over the world, with the authors getting little or no recompense.

The free market does not care that much about quality, although the readers themselves probably care and demand changes accordingly. To a free market distributor what matters most is, where can I get a free version of anything, how can I store it and distribute it to the wider market, free, and what can I get out of it. Sometimes what they get out of it is simply traffic - you come through their site, you pick out free books, you download them, they hope you click on ads, or pick out their books, or something. Maybe they keep track of your information and data and sell it to someone; after all, now they know about your taste in books. But they also know that you're not inclined to pay for them, so, unlike Amazon, the data they are accumulating about your tastes is somewhat marginal in value. So what's in it for them? I'm not sure.

But I'm sure that this is a very active network and it is right on top of all sources of free material. I was in the habit of providing my books for free for a weekend at a time, figuring that, for at least a small celebratory period of time, I could share with my readers some of my work which they would then be able to enjoy as my loyal fans. But what I failed to reckon with was that once I gave the book away free it was, essentially, all over a free market that would make it available free in many venues, all covert but still easily findable, kind of like soft porn, filling up the internet and making sure that anyone who was looking for anything free would have the greatest possible choice available to them. IN other words, a book that was free once, even in a single exchange, where I give a book away free to someone once, in one place, for one reason, has the potential to be free forever and for everyone. That's because, having given it away, I no longer have any claim to what it's being used for or who that person gives it away to, or where it goes after it's left my hands. I have let go of it entirely. I have to stop thinking of "just giving it away" once or twice, or to certain people, or without conditions. If I want to maintain proprietary control, i can't give it away, or, I have to very carefully spell out the conditions.

No doubt though, the free market is voracious; it's ubiquitous; it's relentless. It is partly because of the market. If you think of the number of people who want to learn English, who like a good story, who have reading addictions but not a whole lot of money, you're talking a huge number of people. And it's not that I'm so greedy myself; I have enough money, so I'm a good author for them to pull down into the free market where they can devour everything I write. In the big picture I'm ok with that. I'm kind of like Andy Warhol; I'd rather see my work all over the place, than see myself richer as a consequence of what I do sell. To some degree, I might be able to have it both ways, before it's over.

Possible rebranding

I have written volumes and volumes, and never worried too much about plagiarism. Most of it was on ESL-related topics, and ESL is the kind of field that needs all the help it can get, so I figured, if i could say somthing sane and helpful, just fling it out there and don't worry about it. I put much of it on the web; my only problem really was that my university kept just deleting things without concern. They would sometimes delete a page if it didn't have the right logo.

But lots of that stuff ended up out there and was copied by people, at various times for their dissertation or whatever. Even then I didn't mind, really. They were cheating, yes, but that was their problem, not mine. Having said what I wanted to, I was actually proud: my words were being passed around and read.

Then I started writing short stories (I now have nine volumes) and at least the first half, I put online also. Small wonder it was copied and passed around freely. I actually had a reputation among ESL/EFL students, because often, one free site will be passed along among dozens of people and even put on a message board where others can find it. I'm ok with that, because, by putting it on a free site in the first place, I had to be willing to have it passed around.

Now I have a novel and know that the minute I make it free, for even one day, on Amazon, it will make the rounds again. There are people hovering on that free button on Amazon, and whenever anything is free, they take it, reproduce it, and pass it along free or at minimal charge.

So much of the world is starving for something to read with no money to pay for it, that these free operators can make money even if they charge only 99 cents. But here's where it becomes plagiarism, because they have actually stolen our work, and are passing it off as their service. Their service to steal it and turn around and sell it second-hand.

It's all just words, and in a sense I'm glad I'm known in that world. It makes me happy that at least someone is reading my work. It would make my happier if someone were paying for it as well. I guess that comes after you've been around for a while.