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The fight over plagiarism is the harbinger of a messy new era: How plagiarism became the latest weapon in the culture wars.| Vox

Plagiarism accusations are easier to come by now because of the rise of AI plagiarism detectors, which make it easy to comb through decades’ worth of text and compare it to a vast library of existing work. Ironically, those detectors themselves were built by what might be considered plagiarism. (“As far as I can tell, [AI is] just stealing,” Fran Lebowitz told Vox in October.)

We know for sure that Open AI’s ChatGPT was trained on a vast corpus that apparently includes pirated texts. Multiple high-profile authors have now sued Open AI for copyright infringement, including Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin. In December, the New York Times sued OpenAI as well, arguing that ChatGPT is responsible for the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”

"This argument has persisted for a long time. In 2007, a group of students sued the early plagiarism detector Turnitin, alleging that it was plagiarizing their work. Turnitin, after all, works by archiving every student paper that’s uploaded to run through its filter, and then it charges schools for the use of that archive. The students argued — unsuccessfully — that Turnitin was making money from their intellectual property without their permission.'

Blum says that every era has its own panic about how innovations are endangering intellectual property. “When I first started looking into plagiarism, there was a lot of stuff about how students didn’t have to go to the library anymore and copy things by hand. You could just scrape it off the internet and insert it,” she recalls. “There was a lot of discomfort about this new technology.”

Word processing and Google, a lethal combination, made language infinitely copyable and plagiarism incredibly easy to do, both intentionally and accidentally. Academia had to alter the way it thought about plagiarism to keep pace with the new tools. It developed new tools of its own, like Turnitin, and started spending more time on classroom conversations about how serious plagiarism is. 

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