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Aurornis 2 days ago [-]
> found instances of plagiarism on 20% of its pages, Guémart says, with fragments copied from intellectuals including author Albert Camus, physicist Louis de Broglie, and even some members of his thesis committee.
Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move.
He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly.
At the same time, it's no longer necessary to pick sentences from other people's work and change the phrasing. You can take someone else's paper, feed it into an LLM, and tell it to rewrite it for you. Easier than ever before to launder text.
bambax 2 days ago [-]
> Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move.
Fun fact: he's using this to prove he didn't do anything wrong, as in "see? the people on my thesis committee didn't care I copied their own work, why should anyone else?"
The truth is, people on "thesis committee" don't read thesis. Some do. The director usually does, if he has the time. But many don't; they glance at the intro and conclusion and call it a day.
> He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly
He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich. If you murdered someone before DNA testing was available, that doesn't exonerate you in any way.
jtbayly 2 days ago [-]
A lot of "plagiarism" is not plagiarism. Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from.
I don't know about this case, but a lot of these kinds of cases truly are witch-hunts. It's not at all like the reproducibility crisis and faked data and images.
contubernio 2 days ago [-]
The very few cases that result in sanctions are generally horrendously flagrant.
With another professor I caught a flagrant case in a student thesis and we faced attacks from the university administration because the student had a stellar transcript (also not the positive signal some might think). Punishment was almost inexistent.
It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
gapan 2 days ago [-]
> It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
Personal grudges. Academia is full of them.
kergonath 2 days ago [-]
You need more than that. No university is going to revoke anything without very good reasons, they have too much to lose. Their first action is always to try to bury the case.
goodluckchuck 2 days ago [-]
Different leadership.
If some in your experience erred on the side of leniency, then it stands to reason that others might err just as egregiously in the opposite direction.
In fact, your anecdote suggests erring is the norm. We should thus expect punishments to be inappropriate in one direction or another. An appropriate punishment seems rather unlikely.
contubernio 10 hours ago [-]
The anecdote is meant to illustrate not to substitute a full data set.
Universities and other similar large institutions usually err systematically in one direction - that which protects the institution.
Wolfbeta 2 days ago [-]
I too enjoy creating bell curves from a single datum.
breezybottom 2 days ago [-]
No, that doesn't stand to reason at all.
DoctorOetker 2 days ago [-]
>It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
No respect for the plagiarist physicist, but an easy way to control what media representatives of scientific disciplines get to say publically, is to start out with what amounts to "academic compromat" (scientific fraud, plagiarism, ...).
Did this physicist / media star recently say something controversial?
I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?
kergonath 2 days ago [-]
> Did this physicist / media star recently say something controversial?
Not really. This is the consequence of an investigation by some journalists about a decade ago, and an audit that lasted for almost 2 years.
> I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?
He is a smooth talker and by all accounts good at vulgarisation. He does well in interviews and is easy to deal with for journalists. There’s always been controversies but media thrive on those.
This goes well beyond accidentally triggering a plagiarism detector.
> Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from.
The examples in the article use very distinctive wording. One or two occurrences would be forgivable as coincidence or inspiration. An entire document full of examples points to something else.
elefanto 2 days ago [-]
It seems like that should be the case yet when I listen to any same group of people over a period of time, I often find that those unfamiliar with a concept or solution on day 1 end up repeating it as if it was their own a few weeks later. When I was younger I tended to assume there was an element of intentional theft, but I'm not sure it's natural and a prerequisite to educational acquisition that people can categorize original origin of ideas that may have bounced around them for a long time before they understood their significance.
Aurornis 2 days ago [-]
The plagiarism in the document was more significant than that.
This wasn't a couple cases of the same words or word pairs being used.
elefanto 2 days ago [-]
Sure a common answer would be intentionally copying in the same sessions, less likely is intentionally copying via eidetic memory.. But how much of a spectrum could there be in the middle for memory that would result in repeating a "plagiarism" form months later, etc?
People say how obvious the parlor trick is when they look at a small model LLMs. Well, I've seen the same parlor trick in students who get good grades but seem weak at thought from fundamentals. It seems quite possible to me that in some examples we are now going after them because the environment changed. At much earlier points we did actually value the people who could recite even if somewhat brokenly because we lacked random order recital tools.
philistine 2 days ago [-]
You’re wrong; academia has never accepted plagiarism of this magnitude. Enforcement is never perfect, but a doctorate is not an undergrad repeating verbally, it is not thoughtless writing. It’s a doctorate thesis for crying out loud, it has to be novel!
doublescoop 2 days ago [-]
Crediting the origin of the idea is the whole point of citing sources. Learning something from someone doesn't mean the idea is yours now. It means that when you repeat that idea, you should cite the original source of the idea.
This is just how scholarship works. It's not needed in the kind of day to day most of us do, but when you're writing a thesis for a PhD, this stuff matters. You're making the argument that you're expanding the totality of human knowledge with your dissertation, and that requires strict source citing to separate your original scholarship from the sources that influenced it.
arjie 2 days ago [-]
What are these tools? I often write about stuff on my blog and I know a lot of what I’m writing or thinking about are ideas someone else has come up with (and that I’ve read but not remembered or not read and come up with a poor version of) but bog standard LLM DeepResearch never picks up the things I want.
I imagine any tool that’s good at plagiarism detection would also kill it at this kind of literature research.
An example of something where it worked like this is that I had some ideas around how tribes evolve and so on and wrote them as I could think of them and ChatGPT was able to find that Darwin’s Cathedral had a far better synthesis of various much more rigorous takes on the subject.
kergonath 2 days ago [-]
> I often write about stuff on my blog and I know a lot of what I’m writing or thinking about are ideas someone else has come up with
These tools compare words, not idea. They would not detect someone copying concepts but coming up with their own words. I guess some specially fine-tuned LLMs could work but I am not aware of a company actually licensing those for plagiarism detection.
kergonath 2 days ago [-]
> I don't know about this case, but a lot of these kinds of cases truly are witch-hunts.
There have been a lot of plagiarism accusation in his books already. In this case there was an audit and the conclusions are clear. Whole paragraphs copied and pasted word for word without attribution, about a third of the document overall. If anything, this should have happened about 15 years ago.
nsagent 2 days ago [-]
Having seen plagiarism first hand, sometimes it exceedingly blatant. Like copying from a PDF that was produced via LaTeX — since LaTeX hyphenates words to split them across lines, if you end up keep-ing the hyphenation in, the te-xt reads like this.
IAmBroom 2 days ago [-]
I've seen way worse: a Word document submission that preserved the style and fonts of the sources the plagiarer stole from. As in, font "Calibri 14" only appeared in paragraphs nicked from a source entirely written in that font - and the adjoining paragraphs weren't even size 14!!!
Sadly, this idiot won an award before I was able to see their work, so they had the confusion of receiving an award, and THEN being told they were being spanked for unacceptable behavior. Since they were too stupid to hide the most blatant clues, they had a hard time comprehending this duality.
colechristensen 2 days ago [-]
Academia is very broken if even your thesis committee is A) not interested in reading your thesis and B) can't even be bothered to when it is ostensibly their job.
What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?
gus_massa 2 days ago [-]
Most PhD have a few papers before finishing the dissertation. Many times the dissertation is made of a few paper by the author glued together. The papers usually chain, so it's instead of
introduction1 -> main1 -> conclussion1
introduction2 -> main2 -> conclussion2
introduction3 -> main3 -> conclussion3
the thesis is something like
long introduction -> easy example -> main1 -> main2 -> main3 -> main of preprint -> long conclussion
AlotOfReading 2 days ago [-]
Thesis by publication is only one way, and not even the most common in many fields. I can't access the actual text of this thesis, but the abstract sounds more like a monograph and I don't see any author publications before the thesis that would lead me to think otherwise.
maleldil 1 days ago [-]
What gus_massa was describing doesn't sound like thesis by publication. TBP usually uses the papers verbatim with some added material to make them cohesive to the overall thesis argument. What they described is more like repurposing existing material in a thesis format, which is indeed very common.
IAmBroom 1 days ago [-]
Haven written a Master's dissertation, I think your typo of conclussion for conclusion (suggesting a head injury is needed to slog through it) is perfect.
cge 2 days ago [-]
For both me (physics) and my wife (history), in the American system, both at strong universities, most of our committee members read most of of our dissertations. For her, in a field where thesis by publication is not standard (your thesis is typically revised into your first book), her committee at the defense focused on questions and comments based on the committee's reading of the thesis more than on the actual defense presentation, which is apparently also normal in the field. In part, I expect that's because the thesis is expected to be built into something important post-PhD, and comments are seen as helpful in that process.
For me, it wasn't quite so apparent at the defense, and I don't know that all members read the final thesis carefully, but most of them had already seen me publish or present most of the research previously, often multiple times. I also know that some (and not just my advisor) did read the final thesis very closely. My thesis was only partially thesis by publication, however, which may have influenced this; it does now have a fair number of citations in its own right, which is somewhat unusual for the theses in the field, and potentially seen as awkward (it means there's significant work in the thesis that I never published elsewhere).
As a caveat, the American system (before current crises) does feel like it can have a two-tier system of PhD students who are expected to remain in academia (we both were) and ones who are not, even at strong universities. Expectations, and attention given, can vary considerably. The American system also tends to have larger and more closely involved committees than, for example, the UK/Irish system.
However, for the form of plagiarism discussed here: if someone had sentences from papers I published years ago interspersed in their work, and they weren't particularly notable sentences, I'm not confident I would notice. Depending on citations and what the sentences were, I'm not even sure I'd mind much, for example, if they were essentially copying a model definition.
complex_pi 2 days ago [-]
Academia is very broken. That's it actually.
It's a long time that the incentive and job structure make universities a very toxic environment. Professors are basically running a 40 years race (about from bachelor or master graduation to retirement). It is still amazing that some good comes out of it.
rjzzleep 2 days ago [-]
It's very broken, and I'm not sure if it's possible to write everything original given that you're expected to repeat 2/3rds of past research to fill pages when you write your thesis. For a master thesis that was at least 100 pages. For a PhD nowadays each one of those is published as a book. At least it was like that in my engineering department.
orwin 2 days ago [-]
It's a philosophy thesis, and unlike STEM or soft sciences (history, linguistics...), they are very light on fact which make them very dry. The will read the introduction, conclusion (which can have more words than a physic thesis), the main thesis that interest them the most, and count on their collegue to read the other main thesis.
Also, very dry, so it's easy to loose focus, and you can read a rephrasing of your own thesis as a "he has the same ideas" (also, if you do that, please reference the author?)
I find a few of the example damning (hje should totally have added a citation and build his argument around it). Most less so, and i understand that a reader could not catch them.
maleldil 1 days ago [-]
What you create is the research along the way, which usually gets published. The dissertation is just a document that examiners read.
foldr 2 days ago [-]
It varies a lot by field, but in many (not all) scientific fields, a PhD thesis is largely a formality these days. Your publication record is what counts. The days where you could get a tenure track faculty position just on the strength of a PhD thesis are long gone.
wbl 2 days ago [-]
Depends on the subfields. CS is by publication, number theory varies ("my students can find a stapler" to the dissertation has revolutionary result not published elsewhere)
mswphd 2 days ago [-]
CS can (but not frequently) have the revolutionary result you mention as well. A candidate Fully Homomorphic Encryption scheme was first detailed in Craig Gentry's thesis, for example. That being said, this is much less common than a
1. literal stapler thesis, or
2. cleaned up version of a stapler thesis (e.g. rewrite of several previous publications to give broader context etc)
wbl 2 days ago [-]
Cryptography is closer to math than most CS disciplines institutionally.
mswphd 1 days ago [-]
that's broadly true, but there are some areas of CS that are at least as close (say at a minimum PL theory). it's also less math heavy than e.g. complexity theory (though that's admittedly smaller). It can also be less math-heavy than learning theory. This all depends on the type of cryptography as well, especially since it can depend on the region (american cryptography is more theoretical than european cryptography, for example).
a-dub 2 days ago [-]
that's how i understand it. it's a portfolio with front matter, back matter, the papers that got published with some connective tissue between them and maybe some discussion of the things that didn't work out and why.
swatcoder 2 days ago [-]
Early work in any trade is mostly junk, and academia no exception.
But the process of creating that work, engaged throughought that process with those purported to be more practiced, is usually pretty good at seeding enough expertise and confidence that you might be able to proceed more independently and with real novelty, or might at least be prepared to share the trade with others new to it.
That's the point of those years, and so it's more than a little ironic that AI is being used to undermine a practicing expert while simultaneously eroding the traditional process for becoming one by making it so easy to just generate slop and engage with hallucinations than to actually practice writing deep work or engaging with primary sources.
colechristensen 2 days ago [-]
The whole idea of a PhD is acknowledging that a person has made a meaningful contribution.
It is not "early work" but the end of early work. The masterpiece: the piece of work that proves a subject has mastered their craft.
If you're still producing junk you haven't earned your PhD.
jltsiren 2 days ago [-]
I guess I disagree with both of you.
You probably have plenty of novel ideas in early career, but you almost certainly lack the experience and the basic understanding of your field to develop them properly. Most people have exhausted their own ideas by mid-career. But that that point, they should have the skills and the experience to work on the ideas they come across.
(Looking back at my PhD, it's quite amusing how little did I understand. On the other hand, many of the choices I intuitively made turned out to have some value. But in some cases, understanding that properly took a decade of work by other people.)
Your PhD work is an apprenticeship, after which you are expected to work as a journeyman. The masterpiece that qualifies you for independent work as a tenured professor is often called habilitation. Many academic cultures don't have those, because the expectations are so situational that they don't want to formalize them.
foldr 2 days ago [-]
That’s how people outside academia see PhDs. Inside academia, everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much. It can take decades to really become an expert in a field, and a PhD program usually lasts around 5 years (in the US).
colechristensen 2 days ago [-]
>everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much
Then academia is broken and the universities that operate like this should be dismantled (not to mention the accreditation organizations)
What's actually happening is people chasing items on a CV instead of actual knowledge is rotting the core of universities.
wholinator2 2 days ago [-]
I believe the person was saying that in academia, literally everyone has a PhD, by definition since it's a requirement for the job, so the simple act of having it means nothing in the context of all of the other people that have it. It of course means a great deal since it's what let's you in to the room in the first place. Imagine interviewing 50 people, every single one of whom have an internship on their resume. What they did during their internship matters of course, but the simple act of having had one doesn't differentiate (matter).
I find it rich how fast you are to jump to destroying the entirety of academia in one stroke. It's quite easy to say things we don't understand should not exist, of course I'm guilty of this myself from time to time. Have you done education beyond the bachelor's degree? It's a very different world.
foldr 2 days ago [-]
Who does or doesn't have a PhD isn't terribly important in the scheme of things. Inside academia, the job market is highly competitive, and no-one is getting a job just on the strength of a cookie-cutter PhD thesis. Outside academia, it mostly makes no difference to anything whether you have a PhD or not.
If we apply your criteria, I'm not sure if any universities would be left.
BDPW 2 days ago [-]
I think they mean that a phd doesn't mean much relatively speaking, since everyone around has one so it's less impressive and you're less of an expert when everyone around you is knowledgeable in the same domain.
vjk800 2 days ago [-]
That's how it was maybe 100 years ago. Now PhD is just another bit of school work. Sometimes people manage to do really great PhD work, but most of the time it's pretty mediocre or straight garbage.
In some ways, people doing research now have it way more difficult than people of the past. They have hundreds of years worth of research to study before they are on top of things and making an original contribution that stands out among the huge amount of research that already exists is really hard. If we want to keep PhD as a proof of meaningful work, then we ought to lengthen the graduate studies considerably. How about a 10 year PhD program, at the end of which you can really say you have mastered the field?
breezybottom 2 days ago [-]
Well that's the ideal yes, but it's not the reality.
Calavar 2 days ago [-]
The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.
There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.
gowld 2 days ago [-]
What if you don't grow intellectually and just slap together a PhD thesis that no one reads?
bombcar 2 days ago [-]
Then you've benefited nothing beyond the paper and the letters.
It's really the "cheat yourself" problem, except we put some value on that paper and those letters.
TFNA 2 days ago [-]
> The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.
This definitely varies by field. For example, there are some branches of linguistics where the big, important new monographs that move the field forward are often PhD theses (though typically the defended diss manuscript will get some very light rewriting and polishing before it appears from a publisher). After that, a scholar's publications over his/her career might be less ambitious and focused more on minutiae.
psychoslave 2 days ago [-]
Reproducing elitist social structure?
thaumasiotes 2 days ago [-]
> He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich.
What crime?
mysterydip 2 days ago [-]
“Creepy old man says police should release him on account of Scooby Doo not existing at the time he decided to dress up as a ghost”
andy99 2 days ago [-]
Personally I think writing with an LLM is at least as bad as stitching together phrases from others.
The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means. Even if it fits the letter of the definition, on a phd thesis that may or may not be a big deal. If he’s passing off the ideas of others as his, or faking his research by using the results of others or making them up, then that’s really bad. If he’s just using phrases / wording from others to get his original points across, it looks bad but I don’t see it as a huge deal, especially 30 years out from the phd.
A PhD is supposed to be original research, if the originality or integrity is in question that’s one thing, the rest is much more pedantic, even if technically wrong.
Aurornis 2 days ago [-]
> The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means.
They link to the document that shows the plagiarized sections side by side with their sources
I don't read enough French (especially at PhD thesis level!) to parse everything, but even I can see phrasings copied from the source documents in a lot of the examples. Some of them weren't even paraphrasing, they were lifting the exact distinctive word choices.
bambax 2 days ago [-]
He has a lot of wild defense arguments; one of my favorites is: at some point in his life he lost the ability to speak; to recover his voice he trained it by reading aloud some books over and over, so much so that the content of these books became part of his own brain / of himself.
(Another one, unrelated, but also wild, argues that people who attack him are in fact against science itself, that they want to go back to the Middle Ages, etc.)
It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters!
kergonath 2 days ago [-]
> It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters!
Also, being able to get ideas, synthesise them and present them in a way palatable for mainstream audiences is a useful skill and an important role in society. It’s just not research.
xtracto 2 days ago [-]
I don't understand who would plagiarize for their PhD thesis. In a PhD thesis one of the main things you want is to "blame it" on others so that you don't have to "justify" the text. The more references you have, the better, and the less questioning you have (those are peer reviewed published references after all).
dmbche 2 days ago [-]
No no he was copy pasting! In the Arret sur image article you can read a whole sentences plagiarized where the author just changed "En effet" to "Toutefois" (for example) at the begining of the quote.
dmfdmf 2 days ago [-]
FYI, En effet = Indeed. Toutefois = However. I had to translate so I thought I'd share.
lukan 2 days ago [-]
Is it confirmed, that it was intentional?
That is his defence:
"Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said."
I have never published anything in academic context, but I did write a lot and I often found that phrases of the same topic I read before creep into my own writing, so I could see this happening to me without intention.
"the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim"
On the other hand, this is in fact the standard defence when someone is accused of plagiarism. But sometimes it might actually be correct? (No idea here, my french ain't good enough either)
In general the reaction seems out of proportion to me, I much rather would like to have focus on actual fraud in science.
I sometimes read this blog for example and there seem to be other things going on with less attention.
Rephrasing is worse than literal copying from a procedural point of view because it demonstrates intent and obviates a defense of mere incompetence.
DoctorOetker 2 days ago [-]
Exactly: it takes more brain cycles to paraphrase, then to simply attribute the quotes appropriately, this did not happen unintentionally.
bitwize 2 days ago [-]
You are committing plagiarism any time you express anyone else's idea without proper attribution in an academic paper. This is, or was, drilled into the head of every college freshman in America. Such instances should be relatively straightforward to identify regardless of closeness of phrasing.
seydor 2 days ago [-]
It was a philosophy thesis, what's new in philosophy the past century
jltsiren 2 days ago [-]
Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), A Theory of Justice (Rawls), and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) have all been pretty influential.
2 days ago [-]
foldr 2 days ago [-]
If anything from 1926 onwards is fair game, then tons of work in the foundations of mathematics. And if you're willing to be slightly more more generous with your time-frame: Russel's paradox.
Honestly, (not knowing about this case specifics) I don't think even copying Camus or de Broglie passages (not an entire text of course) is much of a problem to be honest. At one point some things become more or less common sense or public domain. I think this would be rather than plagiarism "citation misbehavior" -- i.e. failing to cite or mention previous work. Like, not every math geometry paper needs to cite Euclid, you can just talk about triangles; or even copying passages from say the parallel postulate or whatnot, when actually delivering something novel, should not count as fraud or plagiarism, simply failing to cite a historical source, in my opinion.
Also, I believe citation is usually limited to prior written work. I don't think citing personal communications is mandatory, but at least for me lots of ideas come up in personal communications, random discussions, etc.. I think actually we should give more credit in this case, but it shows that attributing fraud for failing to cite may be a little too harsh. Again, I don't know if that's the case here, or if his thesis is just some pastiche or prior work without any significant or original contribution.
nradov 2 days ago [-]
Hopefully someone will eventually run plagiarism detection tools on every single doctoral and master's degree thesis ever submitted at every university worldwide. We need to make an example of those who committed academic fraud by ruining their careers.
Glyptodon 2 days ago [-]
TBH this sounds harder to parse than I expected as there are various situations where rephrasing things is acceptable. I think historically allusion and rephrase, particularly of common and well known things, without citation I think was much more common, but now academics often err in the direction of finding citations for the sky being blue or water wet. And I do trust that it very much went beyond the pale given the university revoking a degree.
crdrost 2 days ago [-]
We must be very clear that this is very light rephrasing.
Just to put it side-by-side in a form that will absolutely not work on mobile but might work if you're on desktop, here's a "two-column form" of an example plagiarism from the thesis:
[ THESIS ] [SOURCE]
les équations de la physique engendrent, les équations de la physique engendrent,
en plus des solutions correspondant aux en plus des solutions correspondant aux
phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune
signification physique directe. signification physique directe (certaines
solutions sont rejetées, par exemple,
parce qu'elles violent la causalité
usuelle). La correspondance entre les
mathématiques et la physique n'est donc
pas biunivoque et naturelle. Ceci laisse
donc planer un doute sur une sorte
Un doute
très sérieux plane donc sur l'idee d'un
isomorphisme entre le language mathé- d'isomorphisme entre le langage (mathé-
matique et la nature. Quant matique) et la nature. [...]
à l'explication platonicienne de la L'explication platonicienne de la
réussite des mathématiques réussite des mathématiques peut être
divisée en deux thèses. La première
pourrait être qualifiée de « platonisme
faible » (celui qui peut être trouvé dans
des dialogues tels que la République).
elle consiste à admettre que
les mathématiques Selon cette conception, les mathématiques
constituent un langage intermédiaire qui constituent un langage intermédiaire qui
permet de passer du monde sensible au monde permet de passer du sensible aux monde
des Idées, qui forme la réalité profonde des Idées qui constitue la réalité profonde
des choses. Si les mathématiques sont des choses. Les mathématiques sont
efficaces, dira un platonicien, c'est efficaces ici
parce qu'elles permettent de viser les parce qu'elles offrent unmoyen de viser les
structures profondes du monde. véritables structures du monde.
crdrost 2 days ago [-]
It's worth pointing out that his M.O. was apparently to sometimes tweak the beginning of a sentence and then word-for-word copy some chunk from this source, some from that source, maybe tweak the ending to create a lead-in to the following sentence... but this is not just "oh some figures of speech lodged in my subconscious" -- this is like "whole sentences were mashed up together."
Just some Google Translate of some of the plagiarized paragraphs, the thesis "The Unity of Physics" has:
> The idea that the diversity of reality is underpinned by a deeper unity is as old as thought itself. Great mythologies recount it, early philosophers affirm it, and modern science has taken up the same agenda by first unifying concepts of motion, matter, and space. Indeed, the desire for intelligibility can arguably not do without the idea of the One. However, simply attributing such a tendency to human nature does not validate its realizations. The proclaimed unity may well prove false—stemming merely from incantation, decree, or fantasy—while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. Yet, if thought were to discover—amidst the shifting mirrors of phenomena—eternal relationships capable of encapsulating them, one could certainly speak of a joy of the mind. While not necessarily an essential framework of thought, the desire for unity corresponds to a nostalgia, a craving for the absolute, an ontological impatience. Yet, the moment it is expressed, it clashes with the irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world. At the close of the century, the increasingly assertive power of physical theories—with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—prompts us to examine the foundations of the physicists' quest for unity, to define its limits, and to consider its current prospects.
This is claimed to be a mashup of paragraphs from three different sources, first, the sentence starting "However..." is said to hail from Jean-Michel Besnier's "Theories of Knowledge",
> Could the "monist" tendency inherent in the act of knowing be suggested any more clearly? Yet, simply positing such a tendency within human nature is obviously not enough to validate its realizations. Indeed, that unity may well prove illusory, stemming from sheer fantasy while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. That is precisely why critical philosophy sets out to distinguish between the scientific and...
Followed by a bit of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus,"
> If man were to recognize that the universe, too, can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought were to discover, within the shifting mirrors of phenomena, eternal relationships capable of summarizing them—and of summarizing themselves in a single principle—one could speak of a happiness of the spirit of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ludicrous counterfeit. This longing for unity, this craving for the absolute, illustrates the essential movement of the human drama. Yet the fact that this longing exists does not imply that it must be immediately appeased.
The last sentence of Sisyphus was changed except for the "Yet" to what appeared to be an original sentence or two in the thesis, "Yet ... irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world" -- but only to immediately jump into a third line from Parrochia's "Grand Revolutions of the 20th Century,"
> The increasingly assertive power of modern physical theories—along with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—now enables the scientist to occupy, to some extent, the role held by the philosopher from antiquity through the classical age. This is by no means the least significant consequence of the revolution we have experienced...
My very very initial read of this style, I would almost guess that he paid someone else -- someone who did not have a science education -- to write his thesis for him. And probably if that were true, then he had to provide the sources, "I like this sentence from here, that one from there, you see I highlighted this paragraph of this paper -- I'll highlight and you just paste everything together into one big whole and I'll look through the word processor and tweak a couple of sentence beginnings and endings to make everything look nice for the committee and probably only one person on the committee really reads a bit of it but let's be honest that they're all busy with their own research." With that sort of origin, that's how you get the "blind copying without rephrasing" type of thing (The person who's copying doesn't trust their technical chops to rephrase anything! "What if I choose the wrong word and it has another meaning in science and I embarrass myself?" -- so they go verbatim, "this made sense to someone who was well educated in the sciences, it can't be too embarrassing") with a little bit of tweaks between the chunks.
The really incredible thing about the plagiarism report is the 16 copié-collé/copy-paste sections AFTER this one, where it's just like "Yep, he stole whole pages at a time from his sources in just this way."
mikgp 2 days ago [-]
We need like an international plagiarism body to give you a stamp of approval when you write your dissertation so this doesn’t come back to bite you 20 years later.
A lot of times when I read certain plagiarism examples (Claudine Gay for instance)
Like plagiarism seems like it can happen for three reasons:
1. You intentionally tried to take someone else’s effort / ideas and make them your own. Real bad
2. You were lazy didn’t read enough to know to attribute correctly. Not great?
3. You were writing about a set of ideas that only have so many ways to express them. You really didn’t know.
I’m not saying we should give plagiarism a pass but maybe a statute of limitations? It seems really hard to tell 20 years later. Because to a certain extent - is this a case of 1? Did he pass of effort as his own? Or, if he has attributed Camus would you say “fair ‘nough mate, wasn’t central to your innovation”
Maybe we need to assess every paper ever written and figure out which percentage can be accused of plagiarism. Intuitively it seems like the number would be high.
paytonjjones 2 days ago [-]
It's been a while so I may be misremembering, but my memory was that the Claudine Gay case was one I looked at expecting a nothingburger and instead found "Oh, this is actually meaningfully beyond-the-pale plagiarism".
But yes, in general, I do think a LOT of academics could be accused of the milder forms of plagiarism if you scrutinized all of them.
paytonjjones 2 days ago [-]
I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts.
The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes.
Should they have used quotation marks? Technically, yes. But using them breaks up the flow for the reader, and it's not like they are failing to give credit to Einstein.
As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.
kergonath 2 days ago [-]
> I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts.
It’s not the case here.
> The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes.
Again, that’s not the case here. There was no attribution, no reference, and no quotes, for entire paragraphs. About a third of the thesis overall.
> As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.
Which is fine, but again not very relevant to this case.
orwin 2 days ago [-]
It's not his physic thesis, it's his philosophy thesis. I think i will make a comment or ask dang to change the title to make it clear
paytonjjones 2 days ago [-]
That would be good but the same principle applies. A huge part of a thesis in any field is just summarizing existing work, and if represented as such along with referencing names, may technically be plagiarism but most academics do not see it as the "bad kind" of plagiarism.
NewsaHackO 2 days ago [-]
OK, that is relevant context, because the quotes that people are saying he plagiarized wouldn't make sense to count as plagiarism in a physics thesis. I was scratching my head, thinking of how he could have plagiarized Camus in a physics thesis that isn't just some turn of phrase.
autoexec 2 days ago [-]
The university should suffer consequences as well since their thesis committee completely failed to do their job, especially those who didn't even notice they were the people whose work was being plagiarized. Since it's been demonstrated that you can successfully copy/paste your way to a PhD at this university this calls into question the validity of every other PhD obtained there.
Apparently anti-vaxxers who both died of "fake news" COVID.
ttoinou 2 days ago [-]
They had no impact / influence on COVID skeptic debates in France though
himinlomax 2 days ago [-]
They died of it too early for that.
ttoinou 2 days ago [-]
Thus they can't really represent french anti vaxxers. If you have to judge people by the most stupid of them, then the pro-vaxxers surely contain much more people and more stupid than anti vaxxers
alexey-salmin 1 days ago [-]
Bokonon tells us, incidentally, that members of a duprass always die within a week of each other.
adalacelove 2 days ago [-]
It reads like those nightmares where you need to pass final exams again.
I guess nowadays it is much simpler to correlate some text with prior work, more so with LLMs. It is like those doping cases where several years later we are able to detect a previously unknown sustance in an old sample.
MinimalAction 2 days ago [-]
Given the advent of LLMs, I don't know if plagiarism is ever a thing anymore. Nobody is stupid enough to include verbatim unless citing those works. Feed into an LLM to get a paraphrased version conveying the same meaning.
It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.
hombre_fatal 2 days ago [-]
Plagiarism was always a stupidity/laziness charge though. People too lazy to reword the thing they’re copying and too dumb to realize they’d get caught.
If anything, the charge has even more gravity now since now you were too lazy to use an LLM. Kinda like when you see bad English in an Amazon product listing and wonder if you even want to buy from a company who was too lazy to use a free LLM to fix up the copy.
If the ecosystem required copy and paste to discover copied ideas, then it was doomed long ago and it’s a good thing that the AI era finally forces real process change.
MinimalAction 2 days ago [-]
That makes a lot more sense when you put it that way. Nevertheless, it is ever more harder to prove something is legitimately one's own work. That is worrisome when it comes to science where credits matter more than for glory; job markets only value publication outputs which may have been cheaper to obtain with LLMs now and harder to distinguish what's yours and what's not.
henearkr 2 days ago [-]
For anybody not willing to burden their text with full-on quotations, but to avoid such plagiarism claims:
It can be as unobtrusive as putting a simple footnote after each of those paraphrased blocks of text, thus only appearing as tiny numbers in the text.
If Klein had just done that, he would have escaped this kind of accusation, while not changing a single character of his books as they are currently written -- except for the tiny footnote numbers. The footnotes contents can also be gathered at the end of the book, and this is completely normal.
And there is nothing wrong with a text full of footnotes. That's really the standard, actually, in books targeting advanced readers, such as students.
DamnInteresting 2 days ago [-]
Most of the time it's also necessary to put quotation marks or similar formatting (e.g., box, pullquote, or indentation) on the cited text to make it clear a) that it is a citation; and b) where the citation begins and ends.
If one does that, assuming citations are not the bulk of the work, one should be in the clear.
henearkr 2 days ago [-]
But this doesn't apply in Klein's case, as he rephrased, and this had some purpose as it increased the integration and logical coherence of the whole.
If it is rephrased, you cannot just put quotation marks.
But you still have to indicate the source of the rephrasing (especially when it is lightly rephrased) e.g. by a footnote.
nobrains 2 days ago [-]
Its the same guy who tweeted a photo of a pepperoni claiming it to be a star
psychoslave 2 days ago [-]
>clearly gives a strong impression of cronyism
God damn¹, Louis XIV’s country that inspired La société du spectacle to Guy Debord is actually a great place to make a career as a courtesan, who would have guess.
Guillotine images in streets are also on the rise: I can no longer make the smallest road trip without seeing some plastered all around.
Looks like neither the wanna shine as elite in the bonnes gens side nor the drive me to unsustainable pauperized state in the crowd can refrain from their extreme propensities.
'with fragments copied from intellectuals including author Albert Camus, physicist Louis de Broglie, and even some members of his thesis committee.'
I don't know much about how one gets a PhD, but I assumed it involved the thesis committee reading your thesis? They didn't notice their own work?
Did they not notice? Is that because they copied it off sometime else!?!
fencepost 2 days ago [-]
I'm not digging into the report, but as a general problem particularly in some niche fields I worry about the "Melancholy Elephants" problem as written about by Spider Robinson back in the 80s. He was talking more about copyright, but I could easily see the same thing happening elsewhere.
neilv 2 days ago [-]
1. What happens when schools start hiring faculty with dissertations full of LLM output that's essentially the same thing as the plagiarism that this person is alleged to have done?
2. Well, at least it's an option in their back pocket, if they ever need to get out of a regretted contract or tenure commitment.
3. The article mentioned "weekly radio show". While presumably not the case here, the idea of academic as public public influencer suggests that rogue politicians could use allegations of academic plagiarism (due to LLM) to neutralize an academic who is saying something they don't like, when funding levers can't be used.
(Examples of topics for academic positions that some politicians might not like: climate change, race/ethic, sex/gender, geopolitic, safety scandal of campaign donor, planetary flatness.)
(I'm guessing this attack might work, since academics tend to profess more (dare I say it) conservative ideas about integrity than the overall population, and the universities value their own reputations highly. And academics have some rules and hierarchies, and they enforce rules when a transgression is called out in a way that can't be ignored. So, even if the general population goes full AI acceptance of people putting their name as author on things that aren't their own work, you'll have a lot of academics holding their own to a higher standard. And they already have a belief that plagiarism is bad. Fabrication is another bad. Popular LLMs are currently spewing both heavily.)
orwin 2 days ago [-]
@dang: is it possible to add a word to the title to make it less clickbaity? French physicist and media star loses +++philosophy+++ doctorate after plagiarism investigation
dang 2 days ago [-]
Bit of a hard one as the limit is 80 chars.
Is he actually a physicist, as the article says? If so, I don't see that the title is misleading.
I suppose it could say "French physicist loses philosophy doctorate after plagiarism investigation" but it would probably lead to a different sort of confusion.
orwin 2 days ago [-]
He is an engineer in material physics (DEA is basically Master degree in engineering + 1 year of internship/certification).
sourcegrift 2 days ago [-]
I only came here for the pasta and as of 122 comments nobody has posted it. Sadly one of the brothers is no more
bvan 1 days ago [-]
In the era of AI this is quaint. They ain’t seen nothing yet.
2 days ago [-]
moralestapia 2 days ago [-]
I'm glad to see this as a start.
As much as ~60-70% of current academia leaders have bogus credentials and engage in plagiarism (from their colleagues, students, etc...).
It's just terrible, we live in a modern dark ages because of this.
pixel_popping 2 days ago [-]
Literally, but of course when there is a news about it, suddenly it's "surprising", it's like when people find out about the Olympic games that their favorite athlete is leveraging steroids, hormones, drugs and so-on and act surprised (sure, even a 16-year old at the gym is using steroids but the one that is "at the top" doesn't? Absurdity), it's tiring to see, obviously virtually everyone is using PEDs there, the same way as virtually every student cheat to an extent.
Cheating in life isn't necessarily that bad, if you are at the end of your studies and it's either you pass by cheating, either you don't, then the only logical thing to do is to cheat, who would go in more debt and potentially ruin their live doing otherwise, and WHY?
AaronAPU 2 days ago [-]
It’s like this everywhere all at once. The bullshitters have won at natural selection.
leephillips 2 days ago [-]
Too bad Harvard doesn’t have similarly high standards.
ksd482 2 days ago [-]
Can you elaborate ?
Recently a Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sacked.
Also Francesca Gino was also punished for her (alleged still ? ) fabrication of data.
So what's the problem ?
leephillips 2 days ago [-]
The problem is that Claudine Gay was not sacked, she was allowed to resign as president and is still, at this moment, a professor at Harvard. Here is her faculty web page:
So Harvard employs, as a full professor, someone whose Ph.D. thesis contained loads of plagiarism (I’ve seen the evidence, it’s not contestable). A similar offense on the part of the students who sit in her classroom, according to Harvard’s own rules, could lead to expulsion.
EDIT: Also, as pointed out in a comment below, Prof. Gay’s Ph.D. is from Harvard. It was not revoked.
ksd482 2 days ago [-]
I wonder in the case of Francesca Gino, how much of that was driven by Harvard.
I remember it was technically initiated by the Harvard business school, but it was probably triggered by data colada launching their own investigation.
This speaks to your point.
leephillips 2 days ago [-]
Unfortunately I’m not familiar with this case.
TMWNN 2 days ago [-]
> Recently a Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sacked.
But Gay's PhD was not revoked.
aag 2 days ago [-]
“You may note however that the university has not issued any statement refuting the information reported in the press.”
Barbing 2 days ago [-]
>Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said.
That's wild I didn't expected the plagiarism to be that blatant. Extra shocked as a French who enjoyed listening to many of his talks
anthk 2 days ago [-]
The French since Derrida won't produce anything better than academic postmodernist nonsense slop but without needing the outputs from LLM degradation. OTOH, the VLC and FFMPEG/Qemu creators should be put first as the good examples on being a good French STEM people instead of the 99% of bullshitters at TF1 debating nonsense which IMHO they became largely irrelevant since Francis Bacon and Pascal. These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits about them and that's the recipe for disasters such as Sokal.
ttoinou 2 days ago [-]
France is bacon but Francis is english
These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits
Correct. French people are universalist, egalitarian, utopian, theory building lover, often refusing facing reality, however those traits are exactly what helped them build among the best products and theories in STEM
ttoinou 2 days ago [-]
Ironic especially given he spent the last 6 years going on all french public debate spaces to uniquely talk about "ultracrépidarianisme" / Dunning–Kruger effect and tell everyone they should listen to the real Scientists (like him, of course) and not the people-not-approved-by-media-and-state
jklinger410 2 days ago [-]
More blood will be spilled of unsuspecting academics before the credulity of the science industrial complex can be restored.
throwfaraway135 2 days ago [-]
The fixation on word level plagiarism is bullshit, tell me how much of the novelty is plagiarized.
logifail 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
TheJCDenton 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
utopiah 2 days ago [-]
Ah yes... Etienne, very eloquent otherwise. /s
For a bit of an equivalent more US tech people could appreciate, he's kind of the national local Lex Friedman. He initially focused on this domain but then gradually had more and more famous guests across any field where he didn't have the required expertise.
p1dda 2 days ago [-]
Neal degass Tyson comes to mind
wiether 2 days ago [-]
> One of France’s most famous science communicators
Should have added context to my message but I'm French and lived in France all my life.
If his supposed popularity is coming from a spot on France Culture, I understand why I'm not familiar with him or his work
utopiah 2 days ago [-]
I don't want to legitimatize anything but he has been on France Inter, RTL, TF1, France 5, France 3, Canal+, LCI, LCP, Arte, etc.
Are you suggesting he isn't actually popular or rather than you do not listen to France Culture or yet something else?
I'm a bit confused as it's quite easy to check that he is indeed famous (again, not claiming it has any consequence on this work) in France related to popularizing science. I would bet, but feel free to ask around, that most people interested in scientific popularization know of him, but please do ask around, I'd be curious if it's just in my social circles.
wiether 2 days ago [-]
I don't listen to France Culture or any other radio station for that matter ; only FIP.
And I don't watch TV so it won't help either.
After posting my first comment I actually did asked, first at work and later to friends/family ; the only positive answer was from someone who listen to France Inter daily. Otherwise they said they never heard of the guy.
Actually it's an interesting topic because it's far from the first time that I see some journalist talking about "someone famous", and yet I never heard of them.
It seems that there's actually no real "mainstream medias" like it used to be when I grew up, where the vast majority of people were watching the 20h everyday.
Talking to adults in their 20s is quite illuminating.
Things we could consider "mainstream" are unknown to them. They don't even know they exists.
That's funny you're referring to "PAF" because it was a confusing word for me for a long time: it was used for this purpose, but also the "PAF" (as Participation aux frais) written on events flyers. Trying to find their meaning while thinking they were the same word...
puzu 2 days ago [-]
>he has been on France Inter, RTL, TF1, France 5, France 3, Canal+, LCI, LCP, Arte, etc.
...so he's an entertainer for the masses, if you get your science knowledge from these medias I have bad news for you.
wiether 2 days ago [-]
That's not what I understood from their posts.
They know of him because he's going on lots of radio stations/tv channels.
They haven't expressed any opinion on what they think about the guy.
utopiah 2 days ago [-]
... then I have bad news for you where most people get their current knowledge or news, scientific or not.
PS: FWIW I repeated in multiple posts that it was solely about popularity, nothing else, but I can make this explicit here again.
lejeanvaljean 2 days ago [-]
Knowing the political ideas of some journalists from "Arrêt sur Images", I would like that they also criticize other people than someone named "Klein".
phtrivier 2 days ago [-]
I assume you're seing hints of antisemitism here (which is a real topic for French far left, don't get me wrong.)
That being said, I suspect people in ASI can read Liberation, so they would know that Etienne Klein comes from a Catholic family [1].
Names can be tricky : the founder of the site is called Schneidermann... and yet he had troubles with Israel nationals... [2]
The managing director and founder of "Arrêt sur Images" is Daniel Scheidernmann.
morninglight 2 days ago [-]
The French can be profoundly petty. This smells like an act of personal / political revenge. Klein has a long standing as one of France's best-known scientists and a gifted popularizer of science. If a crime was committed then it is clearly his thesis committee that should be punished.
Shall we now impute dishonor on all those whose past writing cannot pass an AI examination? Do we start with Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, George Gamow, Michio Kaku, ...?
In any case, we need to hurry. You may not care, but there is some jackass in France who is losing sleep.
alphabeta3r56 2 days ago [-]
I don't know whether his popular science work is plagiarized or not but about his thesis, it seems somewhat stupid To punish him
So many things in physics have to be written in a very specific manner , to convey the meaning of the precise concepts being used. in such cases, it is a very common practice to copy the sentences used before, in order to ensure that everyone understands the meaning in a precise manner.
So then to call it plagiarism doesn't make any sense
Planktonne 2 days ago [-]
1. The committee that examined his work in depth didn't reach the same conclusion as you
2. If you need to use the exact same phrase as someone else, then you should cite them
stymaar 2 days ago [-]
He doesn't have a PhD in physics but in philosophy of Sciences. So he didn't plagiarize physics but philosophy.
Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move.
I can't read enough French to understand every detail, but the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim: https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly.
At the same time, it's no longer necessary to pick sentences from other people's work and change the phrasing. You can take someone else's paper, feed it into an LLM, and tell it to rewrite it for you. Easier than ever before to launder text.
Fun fact: he's using this to prove he didn't do anything wrong, as in "see? the people on my thesis committee didn't care I copied their own work, why should anyone else?"
The truth is, people on "thesis committee" don't read thesis. Some do. The director usually does, if he has the time. But many don't; they glance at the intro and conclusion and call it a day.
> He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly
He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich. If you murdered someone before DNA testing was available, that doesn't exonerate you in any way.
I don't know about this case, but a lot of these kinds of cases truly are witch-hunts. It's not at all like the reproducibility crisis and faked data and images.
With another professor I caught a flagrant case in a student thesis and we faced attacks from the university administration because the student had a stellar transcript (also not the positive signal some might think). Punishment was almost inexistent.
It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
Personal grudges. Academia is full of them.
If some in your experience erred on the side of leniency, then it stands to reason that others might err just as egregiously in the opposite direction.
In fact, your anecdote suggests erring is the norm. We should thus expect punishments to be inappropriate in one direction or another. An appropriate punishment seems rather unlikely.
Universities and other similar large institutions usually err systematically in one direction - that which protects the institution.
No respect for the plagiarist physicist, but an easy way to control what media representatives of scientific disciplines get to say publically, is to start out with what amounts to "academic compromat" (scientific fraud, plagiarism, ...).
Did this physicist / media star recently say something controversial?
I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?
Not really. This is the consequence of an investigation by some journalists about a decade ago, and an audit that lasted for almost 2 years.
> I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?
He is a smooth talker and by all accounts good at vulgarisation. He does well in interviews and is easy to deal with for journalists. There’s always been controversies but media thrive on those.
They compiled a document with the source material side-by-side https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
This goes well beyond accidentally triggering a plagiarism detector.
> Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from.
The examples in the article use very distinctive wording. One or two occurrences would be forgivable as coincidence or inspiration. An entire document full of examples points to something else.
This wasn't a couple cases of the same words or word pairs being used.
People say how obvious the parlor trick is when they look at a small model LLMs. Well, I've seen the same parlor trick in students who get good grades but seem weak at thought from fundamentals. It seems quite possible to me that in some examples we are now going after them because the environment changed. At much earlier points we did actually value the people who could recite even if somewhat brokenly because we lacked random order recital tools.
This is just how scholarship works. It's not needed in the kind of day to day most of us do, but when you're writing a thesis for a PhD, this stuff matters. You're making the argument that you're expanding the totality of human knowledge with your dissertation, and that requires strict source citing to separate your original scholarship from the sources that influenced it.
I imagine any tool that’s good at plagiarism detection would also kill it at this kind of literature research.
An example of something where it worked like this is that I had some ideas around how tribes evolve and so on and wrote them as I could think of them and ChatGPT was able to find that Darwin’s Cathedral had a far better synthesis of various much more rigorous takes on the subject.
These tools compare words, not idea. They would not detect someone copying concepts but coming up with their own words. I guess some specially fine-tuned LLMs could work but I am not aware of a company actually licensing those for plagiarism detection.
There have been a lot of plagiarism accusation in his books already. In this case there was an audit and the conclusions are clear. Whole paragraphs copied and pasted word for word without attribution, about a third of the document overall. If anything, this should have happened about 15 years ago.
Sadly, this idiot won an award before I was able to see their work, so they had the confusion of receiving an award, and THEN being told they were being spanked for unacceptable behavior. Since they were too stupid to hide the most blatant clues, they had a hard time comprehending this duality.
What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?
introduction1 -> main1 -> conclussion1
introduction2 -> main2 -> conclussion2
introduction3 -> main3 -> conclussion3
the thesis is something like
long introduction -> easy example -> main1 -> main2 -> main3 -> main of preprint -> long conclussion
For me, it wasn't quite so apparent at the defense, and I don't know that all members read the final thesis carefully, but most of them had already seen me publish or present most of the research previously, often multiple times. I also know that some (and not just my advisor) did read the final thesis very closely. My thesis was only partially thesis by publication, however, which may have influenced this; it does now have a fair number of citations in its own right, which is somewhat unusual for the theses in the field, and potentially seen as awkward (it means there's significant work in the thesis that I never published elsewhere).
As a caveat, the American system (before current crises) does feel like it can have a two-tier system of PhD students who are expected to remain in academia (we both were) and ones who are not, even at strong universities. Expectations, and attention given, can vary considerably. The American system also tends to have larger and more closely involved committees than, for example, the UK/Irish system.
However, for the form of plagiarism discussed here: if someone had sentences from papers I published years ago interspersed in their work, and they weren't particularly notable sentences, I'm not confident I would notice. Depending on citations and what the sentences were, I'm not even sure I'd mind much, for example, if they were essentially copying a model definition.
It's a long time that the incentive and job structure make universities a very toxic environment. Professors are basically running a 40 years race (about from bachelor or master graduation to retirement). It is still amazing that some good comes out of it.
Also, very dry, so it's easy to loose focus, and you can read a rephrasing of your own thesis as a "he has the same ideas" (also, if you do that, please reference the author?)
I find a few of the example damning (hje should totally have added a citation and build his argument around it). Most less so, and i understand that a reader could not catch them.
1. literal stapler thesis, or
2. cleaned up version of a stapler thesis (e.g. rewrite of several previous publications to give broader context etc)
But the process of creating that work, engaged throughought that process with those purported to be more practiced, is usually pretty good at seeding enough expertise and confidence that you might be able to proceed more independently and with real novelty, or might at least be prepared to share the trade with others new to it.
That's the point of those years, and so it's more than a little ironic that AI is being used to undermine a practicing expert while simultaneously eroding the traditional process for becoming one by making it so easy to just generate slop and engage with hallucinations than to actually practice writing deep work or engaging with primary sources.
It is not "early work" but the end of early work. The masterpiece: the piece of work that proves a subject has mastered their craft.
If you're still producing junk you haven't earned your PhD.
You probably have plenty of novel ideas in early career, but you almost certainly lack the experience and the basic understanding of your field to develop them properly. Most people have exhausted their own ideas by mid-career. But that that point, they should have the skills and the experience to work on the ideas they come across.
(Looking back at my PhD, it's quite amusing how little did I understand. On the other hand, many of the choices I intuitively made turned out to have some value. But in some cases, understanding that properly took a decade of work by other people.)
Your PhD work is an apprenticeship, after which you are expected to work as a journeyman. The masterpiece that qualifies you for independent work as a tenured professor is often called habilitation. Many academic cultures don't have those, because the expectations are so situational that they don't want to formalize them.
Then academia is broken and the universities that operate like this should be dismantled (not to mention the accreditation organizations)
What's actually happening is people chasing items on a CV instead of actual knowledge is rotting the core of universities.
I find it rich how fast you are to jump to destroying the entirety of academia in one stroke. It's quite easy to say things we don't understand should not exist, of course I'm guilty of this myself from time to time. Have you done education beyond the bachelor's degree? It's a very different world.
If we apply your criteria, I'm not sure if any universities would be left.
In some ways, people doing research now have it way more difficult than people of the past. They have hundreds of years worth of research to study before they are on top of things and making an original contribution that stands out among the huge amount of research that already exists is really hard. If we want to keep PhD as a proof of meaningful work, then we ought to lengthen the graduate studies considerably. How about a 10 year PhD program, at the end of which you can really say you have mastered the field?
There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.
It's really the "cheat yourself" problem, except we put some value on that paper and those letters.
This definitely varies by field. For example, there are some branches of linguistics where the big, important new monographs that move the field forward are often PhD theses (though typically the defended diss manuscript will get some very light rewriting and polishing before it appears from a publisher). After that, a scholar's publications over his/her career might be less ambitious and focused more on minutiae.
What crime?
The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means. Even if it fits the letter of the definition, on a phd thesis that may or may not be a big deal. If he’s passing off the ideas of others as his, or faking his research by using the results of others or making them up, then that’s really bad. If he’s just using phrases / wording from others to get his original points across, it looks bad but I don’t see it as a huge deal, especially 30 years out from the phd.
A PhD is supposed to be original research, if the originality or integrity is in question that’s one thing, the rest is much more pedantic, even if technically wrong.
They link to the document that shows the plagiarized sections side by side with their sources
https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
I don't read enough French (especially at PhD thesis level!) to parse everything, but even I can see phrasings copied from the source documents in a lot of the examples. Some of them weren't even paraphrasing, they were lifting the exact distinctive word choices.
(Another one, unrelated, but also wild, argues that people who attack him are in fact against science itself, that they want to go back to the Middle Ages, etc.)
It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters!
Also, being able to get ideas, synthesise them and present them in a way palatable for mainstream audiences is a useful skill and an important role in society. It’s just not research.
That is his defence:
"Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said."
I have never published anything in academic context, but I did write a lot and I often found that phrases of the same topic I read before creep into my own writing, so I could see this happening to me without intention.
"the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim"
On the other hand, this is in fact the standard defence when someone is accused of plagiarism. But sometimes it might actually be correct? (No idea here, my french ain't good enough either)
In general the reaction seems out of proportion to me, I much rather would like to have focus on actual fraud in science.
I sometimes read this blog for example and there seem to be other things going on with less attention.
https://forbetterscience.com/
Also, I believe citation is usually limited to prior written work. I don't think citing personal communications is mandatory, but at least for me lots of ideas come up in personal communications, random discussions, etc.. I think actually we should give more credit in this case, but it shows that attributing fraud for failing to cite may be a little too harsh. Again, I don't know if that's the case here, or if his thesis is just some pastiche or prior work without any significant or original contribution.
Just to put it side-by-side in a form that will absolutely not work on mobile but might work if you're on desktop, here's a "two-column form" of an example plagiarism from the thesis:
Just some Google Translate of some of the plagiarized paragraphs, the thesis "The Unity of Physics" has:
> The idea that the diversity of reality is underpinned by a deeper unity is as old as thought itself. Great mythologies recount it, early philosophers affirm it, and modern science has taken up the same agenda by first unifying concepts of motion, matter, and space. Indeed, the desire for intelligibility can arguably not do without the idea of the One. However, simply attributing such a tendency to human nature does not validate its realizations. The proclaimed unity may well prove false—stemming merely from incantation, decree, or fantasy—while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. Yet, if thought were to discover—amidst the shifting mirrors of phenomena—eternal relationships capable of encapsulating them, one could certainly speak of a joy of the mind. While not necessarily an essential framework of thought, the desire for unity corresponds to a nostalgia, a craving for the absolute, an ontological impatience. Yet, the moment it is expressed, it clashes with the irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world. At the close of the century, the increasingly assertive power of physical theories—with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—prompts us to examine the foundations of the physicists' quest for unity, to define its limits, and to consider its current prospects.
This is claimed to be a mashup of paragraphs from three different sources, first, the sentence starting "However..." is said to hail from Jean-Michel Besnier's "Theories of Knowledge",
> Could the "monist" tendency inherent in the act of knowing be suggested any more clearly? Yet, simply positing such a tendency within human nature is obviously not enough to validate its realizations. Indeed, that unity may well prove illusory, stemming from sheer fantasy while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. That is precisely why critical philosophy sets out to distinguish between the scientific and...
Followed by a bit of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus,"
> If man were to recognize that the universe, too, can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought were to discover, within the shifting mirrors of phenomena, eternal relationships capable of summarizing them—and of summarizing themselves in a single principle—one could speak of a happiness of the spirit of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ludicrous counterfeit. This longing for unity, this craving for the absolute, illustrates the essential movement of the human drama. Yet the fact that this longing exists does not imply that it must be immediately appeased.
The last sentence of Sisyphus was changed except for the "Yet" to what appeared to be an original sentence or two in the thesis, "Yet ... irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world" -- but only to immediately jump into a third line from Parrochia's "Grand Revolutions of the 20th Century,"
> The increasingly assertive power of modern physical theories—along with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—now enables the scientist to occupy, to some extent, the role held by the philosopher from antiquity through the classical age. This is by no means the least significant consequence of the revolution we have experienced...
My very very initial read of this style, I would almost guess that he paid someone else -- someone who did not have a science education -- to write his thesis for him. And probably if that were true, then he had to provide the sources, "I like this sentence from here, that one from there, you see I highlighted this paragraph of this paper -- I'll highlight and you just paste everything together into one big whole and I'll look through the word processor and tweak a couple of sentence beginnings and endings to make everything look nice for the committee and probably only one person on the committee really reads a bit of it but let's be honest that they're all busy with their own research." With that sort of origin, that's how you get the "blind copying without rephrasing" type of thing (The person who's copying doesn't trust their technical chops to rephrase anything! "What if I choose the wrong word and it has another meaning in science and I embarrass myself?" -- so they go verbatim, "this made sense to someone who was well educated in the sciences, it can't be too embarrassing") with a little bit of tweaks between the chunks.
The really incredible thing about the plagiarism report is the 16 copié-collé/copy-paste sections AFTER this one, where it's just like "Yep, he stole whole pages at a time from his sources in just this way."
A lot of times when I read certain plagiarism examples (Claudine Gay for instance)
Like plagiarism seems like it can happen for three reasons:
1. You intentionally tried to take someone else’s effort / ideas and make them your own. Real bad
2. You were lazy didn’t read enough to know to attribute correctly. Not great?
3. You were writing about a set of ideas that only have so many ways to express them. You really didn’t know.
I’m not saying we should give plagiarism a pass but maybe a statute of limitations? It seems really hard to tell 20 years later. Because to a certain extent - is this a case of 1? Did he pass of effort as his own? Or, if he has attributed Camus would you say “fair ‘nough mate, wasn’t central to your innovation”
Maybe we need to assess every paper ever written and figure out which percentage can be accused of plagiarism. Intuitively it seems like the number would be high.
But yes, in general, I do think a LOT of academics could be accused of the milder forms of plagiarism if you scrutinized all of them.
The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes.
Should they have used quotation marks? Technically, yes. But using them breaks up the flow for the reader, and it's not like they are failing to give credit to Einstein.
As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.
It’s not the case here.
> The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes.
Again, that’s not the case here. There was no attribution, no reference, and no quotes, for entire paragraphs. About a third of the thesis overall.
> As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.
Which is fine, but again not very relevant to this case.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bogdanoff-twins
I guess nowadays it is much simpler to correlate some text with prior work, more so with LLMs. It is like those doping cases where several years later we are able to detect a previously unknown sustance in an old sample.
It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.
If anything, the charge has even more gravity now since now you were too lazy to use an LLM. Kinda like when you see bad English in an Amazon product listing and wonder if you even want to buy from a company who was too lazy to use a free LLM to fix up the copy.
If the ecosystem required copy and paste to discover copied ideas, then it was doomed long ago and it’s a good thing that the AI era finally forces real process change.
It can be as unobtrusive as putting a simple footnote after each of those paraphrased blocks of text, thus only appearing as tiny numbers in the text.
If Klein had just done that, he would have escaped this kind of accusation, while not changing a single character of his books as they are currently written -- except for the tiny footnote numbers. The footnotes contents can also be gathered at the end of the book, and this is completely normal.
And there is nothing wrong with a text full of footnotes. That's really the standard, actually, in books targeting advanced readers, such as students.
If one does that, assuming citations are not the bulk of the work, one should be in the clear.
If it is rephrased, you cannot just put quotation marks.
But you still have to indicate the source of the rephrasing (especially when it is lightly rephrased) e.g. by a footnote.
God damn¹, Louis XIV’s country that inspired La société du spectacle to Guy Debord is actually a great place to make a career as a courtesan, who would have guess.
Guillotine images in streets are also on the rise: I can no longer make the smallest road trip without seeing some plastered all around.
Looks like neither the wanna shine as elite in the bonnes gens side nor the drive me to unsustainable pauperized state in the crowd can refrain from their extreme propensities.
¹ https://www.capmemo.fr/sciences-humaines/983-le-mariage-de-f...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
I don't know much about how one gets a PhD, but I assumed it involved the thesis committee reading your thesis? They didn't notice their own work?
Did they not notice? Is that because they copied it off sometime else!?!
2. Well, at least it's an option in their back pocket, if they ever need to get out of a regretted contract or tenure commitment.
3. The article mentioned "weekly radio show". While presumably not the case here, the idea of academic as public public influencer suggests that rogue politicians could use allegations of academic plagiarism (due to LLM) to neutralize an academic who is saying something they don't like, when funding levers can't be used.
(Examples of topics for academic positions that some politicians might not like: climate change, race/ethic, sex/gender, geopolitic, safety scandal of campaign donor, planetary flatness.)
(I'm guessing this attack might work, since academics tend to profess more (dare I say it) conservative ideas about integrity than the overall population, and the universities value their own reputations highly. And academics have some rules and hierarchies, and they enforce rules when a transgression is called out in a way that can't be ignored. So, even if the general population goes full AI acceptance of people putting their name as author on things that aren't their own work, you'll have a lot of academics holding their own to a higher standard. And they already have a belief that plagiarism is bad. Fabrication is another bad. Popular LLMs are currently spewing both heavily.)
Is he actually a physicist, as the article says? If so, I don't see that the title is misleading.
I suppose it could say "French physicist loses philosophy doctorate after plagiarism investigation" but it would probably lead to a different sort of confusion.
As much as ~60-70% of current academia leaders have bogus credentials and engage in plagiarism (from their colleagues, students, etc...).
It's just terrible, we live in a modern dark ages because of this.
Cheating in life isn't necessarily that bad, if you are at the end of your studies and it's either you pass by cheating, either you don't, then the only logical thing to do is to cheat, who would go in more debt and potentially ruin their live doing otherwise, and WHY?
Recently a Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sacked.
Also Francesca Gino was also punished for her (alleged still ? ) fabrication of data.
So what's the problem ?
https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/claudine-gay
So Harvard employs, as a full professor, someone whose Ph.D. thesis contained loads of plagiarism (I’ve seen the evidence, it’s not contestable). A similar offense on the part of the students who sit in her classroom, according to Harvard’s own rules, could lead to expulsion.
EDIT: Also, as pointed out in a comment below, Prof. Gay’s Ph.D. is from Harvard. It was not revoked.
I remember it was technically initiated by the Harvard business school, but it was probably triggered by data colada launching their own investigation.
This speaks to your point.
But Gay's PhD was not revoked.
Borg?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...
For a bit of an equivalent more US tech people could appreciate, he's kind of the national local Lex Friedman. He initially focused on this domain but then gradually had more and more famous guests across any field where he didn't have the required expertise.
Never heard of him
If his supposed popularity is coming from a spot on France Culture, I understand why I'm not familiar with him or his work
Are you suggesting he isn't actually popular or rather than you do not listen to France Culture or yet something else?
I'm a bit confused as it's quite easy to check that he is indeed famous (again, not claiming it has any consequence on this work) in France related to popularizing science. I would bet, but feel free to ask around, that most people interested in scientific popularization know of him, but please do ask around, I'd be curious if it's just in my social circles.
And I don't watch TV so it won't help either.
After posting my first comment I actually did asked, first at work and later to friends/family ; the only positive answer was from someone who listen to France Inter daily. Otherwise they said they never heard of the guy.
Actually it's an interesting topic because it's far from the first time that I see some journalist talking about "someone famous", and yet I never heard of them.
It seems that there's actually no real "mainstream medias" like it used to be when I grew up, where the vast majority of people were watching the 20h everyday. Talking to adults in their 20s is quite illuminating. Things we could consider "mainstream" are unknown to them. They don't even know they exists.
FIP is cool, I even have a shortcut to play/pause it from anywhere on my system using 'mpv https://stream.radiofrance.fr/fip/fip.m3u8 --no-resume-playback'
...so he's an entertainer for the masses, if you get your science knowledge from these medias I have bad news for you.
They know of him because he's going on lots of radio stations/tv channels.
They haven't expressed any opinion on what they think about the guy.
PS: FWIW I repeated in multiple posts that it was solely about popularity, nothing else, but I can make this explicit here again.
That being said, I suspect people in ASI can read Liberation, so they would know that Etienne Klein comes from a Catholic family [1].
Names can be tricky : the founder of the site is called Schneidermann... and yet he had troubles with Israel nationals... [2]
[1] https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2016/10/23/etienne-klein-il...
[2] https://www.franceinfo.fr/faits-divers/police/la-police-appe...
Shall we now impute dishonor on all those whose past writing cannot pass an AI examination? Do we start with Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, George Gamow, Michio Kaku, ...?
In any case, we need to hurry. You may not care, but there is some jackass in France who is losing sleep.
So many things in physics have to be written in a very specific manner , to convey the meaning of the precise concepts being used. in such cases, it is a very common practice to copy the sentences used before, in order to ensure that everyone understands the meaning in a precise manner.
So then to call it plagiarism doesn't make any sense
2. If you need to use the exact same phrase as someone else, then you should cite them