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- Hacker News
- '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!?!
by jimnotgym - It is more frequent than you think. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14614by cronyism2026
- It's literally the norm.
- >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.
¹ https://www.capmemo.fr/sciences-humaines/983-le-mariage-de-f...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
by psychoslave - Its the same guy who tweeted a photo of a pepperoni claiming it to be a starby nobrains
- 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.
by henearkr - 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by hombre_fatal - 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.
by adalacelove - This is rather reminiscent of the Bogdanov affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affairby maxall4
- Apparently anti-vaxxers who both died of "fake news" COVID.by esafak
- How does the wiki page not mention their living infamy as a memeby krackers
- 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.by autoexec
- 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.
by paytonjjones - 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 clearby orwin
- > 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.
by kergonath - 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.
by mikgp - 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.
by paytonjjones - > 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.
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.
by Aurornis - It was a philosophy thesis, what's new in philosophy the past centuryby seydor
- 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.by bitwize
- Rephrasing is worse than literal copying from a procedural point of view because it demonstrates intent and obviates a defense of mere incompetence.by contubernio
- 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.
by lukan - 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.by dmbche
- 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).by xtracto
- 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.
by andy99 - > 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.
by bambax