|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
(The following was written by hedge fund manager Bill Ackman)
By: Bill Ackman
Last night, no one at @MIT had a good night’s sleep.
Yesterday evening, shortly after I posted that we were launching a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board, I am sure that an audible collective gasp could be heard around the campus.
Why? Well, every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others.
But it wasn’t just the MIT faculty that did not sleep last night. The @Harvard faculty, its governing board members, and its administrative leadership did not sleep either. Because why would we stop at MIT?
Don’t we have to do a deep dive into academic integrity at Harvard as well?
What about Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Penn, Dartmouth? You get the point.
While we are going to do a detailed review of plagiarism at MIT, we are not going to be the only ones who do so.
Every college and university in the world is going to have to do the same for themselves. They will do so because they will need to validate all plagiarism accusations, or someone else will do it for them.
The best approach, however, is probably to launch an AI startup to do this job (I would be interested in investing in one) as there is plenty of work to do, and many institutions won’t have the resources to do it on their own. Perhaps more importantly, the donors are going to demand that the review is done by an independent third party.
For who today is going to trust higher education to review itself?
Consider the inherently irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Would you trust today’s university president to do an examination of their faculty? What are the chances that the reviews would be weaponized to go after faculty members whose politics were not favored by leadership?
We have seen this before with other tools used by university presidents and their deans. Consider the weaponization of MeToo accusations, speech codes, and the other tactics of cancellation that have destroyed free speech on campus, and many faculty members’ reputations, careers, and their families.
By analogy, who would trust even our most credible corporations with auditing their own financial statements? There is a reason why all public companies have independent auditors who are carefully examined by regulators to ensure they maintain quality, standards, accuracy, and independence.
And what if a plagiarism review turned into an incredible embarrassment for the entire university? It could lead to wholesale firings of faculty. Donors terminating their donations. Federal funding being withdrawn, and a massive litigious conflagration where faculty members and universities sue one another about what is plagiarism, and what is not. Think about the inevitable destruction of the reputations of thousands of faculty members as it rolls out around the country, and perhaps the world.
And maybe that’s a good thing.
The Impact of Higher Education on Society and Our Country
When I woke up on the morning of October 7th, my first thought was not that I was going to launch an effort to save higher education from itself. I had other more pressing concerns about the world, and I still have these concerns. But as we all know, our higher education system (HES) is critically important as it can affect and influence the minds of our younger generations, thereby profoundly impacting the lives of all of us.
The HES can affect what’s taught to toddlers and what is taught in elementary and high schools, as ed schools train the next generation of teachers and superintendents, and design the curricula they teach.
The HES can convince a generation that some of us are oppressors, and others are the oppressed, and provide justifications for what kinds and what degree of violence and terrorism are appropriate tools to address this perceived oppression.
The HES can affect our medical establishments and the ethics of medicine, e.g., some of our most controversial procedures and medicines, and the advisability of their use on children, and so on. You get the point, I am sure.
The HES affects our legal system, our ethics, and our basic understanding of right and wrong.
It affects how we think about capitalism and our economic system, and how we address wealth inequality, taxation, monetary and fiscal policy, and consider universal basic income and other alternatives.
It also affects religion and how it is practiced and no longer practiced around the country.
It can advance a monetary theory which states that the U.S. as a sovereign nation has effectively no limit to its spending because it can just print new money without any consequences or loss of solvency.
And then, of course, the graduates of our education system over time become the judges, the Supreme Court justices, the politicians, the members of the media, and the other people that influence and determine our way of life, and help us understand the truth, but whose truth? you might ask.
The HES influences how our national voting system should be administered; the standards for eligibility to run for office; how the primary system works, and what it takes to qualify to be on a ballot in a state.
I could continue, but I am sure that you already understand the power of the HES. You don’t need me to tell you how important it is.
In light of the power of HES, those interested in power would of course desire to take control of our most prestigious and influential universities so that they could ultimately take control of our education system, our government, and then the country at large.
The Power of AI and Its Impact on Plagiarism
Now that we know that the academic body of work of every faculty member at every college and university in the country (and eventually the world) is going to be reviewed for plagiarism, it’s important to ask what the implications are going to be.
If every faculty member is held to the current plagiarism standards of their own institutions, and universities enforce their own rules, they would likely have to terminate the substantial majority of their faculty members.
Over the last few weeks and months, I have literally received hundreds of emails, texts, hand- and type-written letters and cards, and phone calls of support (and 10s if not 100s of 1000s of posts and replies on X) – from friends and strangers, alumni, faculty and students, senior leaders of foreign countries, U.S. senators and members of congress, high profile members of the media, and several presidential candidates – for my efforts to help address the problems at Harvard, MIT, Penn and the higher education system at large. All of that said, most have been pessimistic about the opportunity for necessary change, as nearly everyone believes that it will take decades to fix the problem because of the life tenure system for faculty.
The good news, however, is that with AI, getting rid of tenured faculty is no longer as much of a challenge because it is much easier to fire faculty who have problems with their academic record. It is a near certainty that authors will miss some quotation marks and fail to properly cite or provide attribution for another author on at least a modest percentage of the pages of their papers. I say percentage of pages rather than number of instances, as the plagiarism of today can be best understood by comparison to spelling mistakes prior to the advent of spellcheck.
For example, it wouldn’t be fair to say that two papers are both riddled with spelling mistakes if each has 10 mistakes, when one paper has 30 pages and the other has 330. The standard has to be a percentage standard.
How pervasive are the spelling/plagiarism mistakes? is another question that should be asked. Does the purported plagiarism appear in a small minority of their papers or in the majority of their work?
Importantly, the most productive and important scholars are at the greatest risk under the current system because the more papers and pages you have written, the greater the probability that you missed a citation or some quotation marks, and it is much more likely that someone will check, (until yesterday). Plagiarism is the biggest threat for the most outstanding and most cited scholars because if no one ever reads your work and you do not have a public profile (nor or married to a high-profile person), no one will ever take the time to look.
The more impactful the work and the more important it is, the more likely it will be at risk of being reviewed for plagiarism. But if you have published only a dozen papers of modest length, and the papers are not particularly impactful or highly cited, the risk of having a large number of instances of plagiarism and having it be discovered should be relatively small.
Oppenheimer
The weaponization of AI for plagiarism has become the tactical nuke of the U.S. higher education system. That is potentially good news as the more I have learned about the HES, the clearer it has become that tactical devices and other powerful weapons may be required to win this war.
That said, as we learned in Oppenheimer, nuclear bombs can win wars, but they can also create enormous collateral damage and massive loss of innocent lives. They can kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of innocent civilians, so we need to be extremely careful about how these weapons are used. Because if the plagiarism nukes get into the wrong hands, even more damage can be done to our HES and the country.
So what should we do?
If you think about what plagiarism standards were designed for, the purpose was to protect scholars from the theft of their intellectual property. And protecting intellectual property is critically important as it is the lifeblood of our authors, composers, researchers, designers, architects, artists, companies, and effectively all modern institutions.
Interestingly, while AI can identify plagiarism, AI itself is the ultimate plagiarist. Large language models are by design built off the work of others, as computers have no innate knowledge, at least not yet. [As a side note, I am sure all of us are looking forward to learning the outcome of the NY Times lawsuit against OpenAI in light of its importance.]
As a result of AI, all institutions of higher learning are going to have to update their plagiarism standards.
The good news is that no paper written by a faculty member after the events of this past week will be published without a careful AI review for plagiarism, that, in light of recent events, has become a certainty.
But what do we do about papers written before today, which will inevitably fail an AI plagiarism test? The answer I believe is that there are different kinds of plagiarism, and it depends.
Some plagiarism is due to the laziness of the author. Laziness is not a great excuse for a member of the faculty, but it does not seem like a crime to me. It is more a reflection of the competency and motivation of the faculty member. In the real world, employees can be fired for being lazy, but this can be challenging to do under the tenure system.
Some plagiarism arises from being human, at least before AI systems. A tenured member of the faculty with thousands of pages of published work before the launch of AI systems is going to make some number of unintentional mistakes. The more papers they have published and the more total pages they have, the greater the likelihood of instances of plagiarism.
Other kinds of plagiarism, however, are much more pernicious, like for example, when important ideas are intentionally stolen without attribution. The worst form of plagiarism would be a case where an author intentionally stole another person’s work and presented it as his own, and it represented an important part of the new paper. I expect that this kind is rare, but it is clearly outright theft, and should be treated as such.
There remains, however, many open questions about plagiarism. For example:
Can one use a definition from an online dictionary or encyclopedia without attribution? I honestly don’t know the answer. I have never seen WikiPedia or Dictionary.com cited in any paper. Before Business Insider emailed last night, I never thought about this before. And on this point, what was the standard 15 years ago for citing WikiPedia? Was it different then versus now?
This also raises a more modern question: Is it ok to plagiarize from ChatGPT today? Or does it depend on the outcome of the NY Times case?
You probably get my point by now. We are going to have to come up with new standards for plagiarism.
I think the standard will ultimately be the same as the one the Supreme Court uses for pornography.
To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart:
We will know it, when we see it.
I think universities will ultimately be forced to conclude that there are different kinds and degrees of plagiarism, and the punishment, if any, and the degree of its severity to the faculty member or student will have to be adjudicated based on the specific facts of each case.
As a result of recent events, academic/plagiarism review committees at universities will have to be expanded, as this now becomes a very big job. New standards will have to be designed, and new approaches will have to be taken to ensure that plagiarism review committees are comprised of independent members whose politics, friendships, or otherwise do not affect their judgment in adjudicating these cases.
How nefarious identified plagiarism is determined to be, I expect, will likely be a function principally of: (1) the nature and form of the plagiarism, (2) how pervasive it is in the scholar’s oeuvre, and (3) the nature and importance of what has been plagiarized, and perhaps to some extent, who or what has been plagiarized.
I do believe that intent matters with plagiarism as it does in the securities laws. For example, mens rea, in Latin “guilty mind” (Source: Google search top of page), which is defined by Dictionary.com (!) as “the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing that constitutes part of a crime, as opposed to the action or conduct of the accused that plays an important role in determine[ing] the innocence or guilt of the accused in certain legal contexts.” This is not a great definition, but I will use it here in the interest of time.
I think intent matters because character matters. If the plagiarism was truly unintentional (and there are ways to judge whether this is the case), then I wouldn’t question the character of the author.
Unintentionality could simply be a result of rushing to meet a deadline, something all of us remember from our college days. Or it could be due to a misunderstanding or a lack of clarity as to whether one needs to cite Dictionary.com or the amorphous “Google” as I did above for the translation of the Latin words mens rea.
(To Be Continued Next Week)
