Discussion for article #226748
We are in an era where machines write tens of thousands of wikipedia articles and how-to manuals yet we’re supposed to be outraged when a person does it. There are only so many ways to state reality. You will end up repeating yourself no matter what, and should if you want to drive your point home.
Plagiarism in 2014 sounds too much like jealousy and sour grapes. If you don’t like what he said, don’t read his articles, problem solved.
1 Like
You’re kidding, right? Seems like maybe you’ve plagiarized too? Zakaria is a hack, and now he’s been exposed. Good to know he has at least one hapless fan left!
1 Like
Uh, those are 3 paragraphs lifted without context. That goes far past “repeating yourself”.
1 Like
But … but. Plagiarizing is sooooo much easier than having to write original material.
I do not follow his work, nor am I in a line of work where plagiarism is an issue. As a news consumer, I could not possibly care less. Seems like inside baseball, made irrelevant by machines which rip off humans at an astonishing rate, but that’s not plagiarism? Who cares? I certainly do not.
Information exists regardless of authorship. The writing robots have seen to that. As time goes on, it will be almost impossible not to plagiarize because there are only so many descriptions of reality that refuse to pass muster from a pedantic plagiarizing-sniffing robot.
In other words, it’s the What, not the Who.
No harm, no foul. Anyway, robots which out-write humans are plagiarizing this very moment. Maybe we don’t care because the robots aren’t being, you know, paid? Does any of this materially change the point the author was making?
I’ve taught college social science and philosophy courses for more than forty years, so I’m well acquainted with plagiarism. If one of my students had submitted the passage in question as part of a research paper and had failed to credit Gerges, I would have to flunk him. There’s no question that the highlighted passages cross the line between paraphrase and outright theft.