Right now is the end of the school year for many schools in the USA. That makes it a time for final exams for many students. This week a student I know prepared for the Literature final by reading through the SparkNotes for the book they had read earlier. Then the student took some SparkNotes practice tests on the book. Then the student showed up to take the actual final exam.
The final exam was verbatim the SparksNotes practice test--uncredited.
In Britain we had a government that wholesale plagiarised works to
create the so-called "Dodgy Dossier" - the basis of the case for going
to war in Iraq in 2003 [1]
In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a
prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course
notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to
deliberately remove my name from every page and slide.
The only thing more disgraceful than plagiarism is the arms-race and
racket around "preventing" it with tools like the dubious "Turnitin" -
dubious in its effectiveness, treatment of students work, privacy
implications and the fact that students are compelled to use it, in
most cases without prior formal agreement [2].
I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment in particular of turnitin. I'm somewhat surprised by the copying of course notes though, as in my experience many academics take plagiarism extremely seriously, sometimes overzealously so, i.e. not use the same graph in two distinct works which is completely acceptable IMO.
> In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide.
Did you report it to the university? You should, the academics who do this, should be face consequences and in my experiences plagiarism is one of the few wrongdoings that gets relatively swift action, I suspect because it usually is very clearly unethical conduct.
> Did you report it to the university? You should, the academics who
do this, should be face consequences and in my experiences
plagiarism is one of the few wrongdoings that gets
Of course. But I have to tell you, they skilfully sidestepped it by
blaming an firing a TA, who I happen to know was entirely innocent.
The actual culprit is still a senior professor at that university.
Things are always more complex in real life, as you know. The
professor was also a PhD supervisor to a friend and we had to choose
which battles to fight, rocking the boat would have had consequences
far beyond my own vanity and sense of injustice.
Now I write regular pieces in the Times Higher Education. Having
taught at dozens of universities as an international visiting
professor I've got a wide and deep view of academia. In a nutshell
it's run by gangsters and has a very, very high concentration of
psychopaths (much higher than 'industry' I would say because there are
ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one
from conseqences found in the world of real business)
> Of course. But I have to tell you, they skilfully sidestepped it by blaming an firing a TA, who I happen to know was entirely innocent. The actual culprit is still a senior professor at that university.
Would you or your friend still need to fear reprisals if you're naming names now? If not, given that normal channels have failed that all sounds sufficiently bad that at least naming the university and department might be worth considering.
> there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from conseqences found in the world of real business
Given your experience, I'd be very curious to hear what the main mechanisms your witnessed for side-stepping consequences for psychopathic behavior actually were. Since academia only involves spending other people's money without any direct test against outside reality, it stands to reason that it would be much more vulnerable to capture by colluding bad actors than business, where beyond a certain point of organizational pathology the money stops flowing in. There's of course also at least one mechanism designed specifically to cocoon people, namely tenure. But my guess would be that the main way it encourages the psychopaths is not so much that tenure protects them, but that having veto power over other people's tenure is a very good tool to enforce compliance.
> Would you or your friend still need to fear reprisals if you're
naming names now? If not, given that normal channels have failed
that all sounds sufficiently bad that at least naming the university
and department might be worth considering.
Not really. It is bad. But I've grown thick skinned to it now. It's
water under the bridge, and in the scheme of things, small fry. But if
I was feeling vindictive I'd get lawyered up with a great libel
advisor and write a book about some of the nonsense I've seen, or
personally been party to in "academia"; including extraordinary sexism
and constructive dismissal of women lecturers, a university that
conned people out of their property, lots of crooked real-estate deals
(many UK universities are foremost property developers who happen to
do some teaching and research on the side), obvious bribes from
industry on ICT contracts, blatant fraud on QAA audits, students who
were deliberately led to catch Covid during the pandemic to save a few
quid on housing allocation... I could go on all day, that's just a few
things off the top of my head.
And I can speak freely about stuff that is already public. Just take a
look at London Middlesex University and their record for shutting down
whole departments on ideological grounds and turfing students who are
still midway through studies out the door. It's cheaper to pay the
compensation to the students who are brave enough to go through the
months and years of formal complaints procedure. Academia is a well
protected business.
> > there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which
isolate one from consequences found in the world of real business
> Given your experience, I'd be very curious to hear what the main
mechanisms your witnessed for side-stepping consequences for
psychopathic behaviour actually were.
This isn't the forum for deep discussion, or too much acidic
denouncing, but I do suggest reading Ginsberg's "Fall of the Faculty"
and some of Henry Giroux's work. Both would be labelled "shrill
leftists", in a domain that ironically is already considered "too left
liberal". However, that consideration of orthodox political spectrum
strikes me as irrelevant in this age. What is the problem is the
terrifying rate at which good people are being ousted, or taking early
retirement, or jumping ship from quite senior academic posts to modest
industry roles just to get away from the bullshit. Also terrifying is
the rate at which real teaching and research is being set aside for
cookie-cutter subsidised training for Big-Tech entry - a general
decline in the intellectual quality of everything we teach. Even in
traditional strong holdouts like Cambridge and Oxford I hear the
same. I think we're in real crisis in the universities now.
Plus, for course notes that is just extremely lazy. The students who are paying for the course are almost certainly being cheated, if the instructor can't even write their own slides then I doubt the quality of instruction is very great either.
We had a maths lecturer who got us to buy their text book. Turns out the text book was just copy pasted sections from other maths textbooks in one book. Cost 30 quid, had the old page numbers and was therefore a confusing mess throughout.
My tutor then pointed me to a better maths textbook which was actually worth the money, shame I didn't know about that before!
OK, here is my unrelated plagiarism story...
I was in high school waaaayyyy back in 1974, before the internet lads.
I was in AP path and one class we had to take was a creative writing class, the assignment was to write a poem. I was completely stumped, so I copied the lyrics off the back of a Rick Wakeman Album (Journey to the center of the earth). The teacher said, "one student handed in the most fantastic work" then said my name asked me to read it in front of the class. I did, a few students caught on, but they did not rat me out because they said they were going to use the same idea themselves on the next assignment. I got an A, but it was a dufus move by a dumb kid.
I just don't understand today how anyone can think they could get away with plagiarism with computers and the internet etc.
OMG, so nothing ever changes, the game has just been upped is all!
But here is sort of the funny thing, as I have gotten older, I have grown to appreciate things like poetry a lot more and have even tried my hand at it a few times for fun.
I guess it just proves the old adage "retirement is wasted on the old and school is wasted on the young". Not sure who said that. I probably just committed plagiarism for not including an attribution. Sorry to whomever said it, wait, let me copy some Tracy Chapman Lyrics for the apology :)
One kind of AI-enabled plagiarism that can be very difficult to detect is done by students who are writing in a second language. They copy-and-paste text from Wikipedia (or whatever) in their first language into DeepL or Google Translate and submit the output to their teachers as if it were their original work.
Teachers sometimes become suspicious because the students’ submitted texts contain many fewer grammatical errors and nonidiomatic expressions than the students’ speech or in-class writing. But it is hard to prove plagiarism if the teachers cannot do web searches in the students’ first language.
I did hear once, though, of a cut-and-paste MT translation being caught by a teacher because it included some large unique numbers, which did appear in a Google search.
A related issue that writing teachers are struggling to come to terms with is whether second-language writers are cheating when they use MT to translate texts that they originally wrote in their first language. Some teachers, especially in language-focused classes, believe that the use of MT hurts the students’ language acquisition and thus defeats one purpose of the writing assignments; they also think it is unfair to other students who struggle to write in the second language without the help of MT. Other teachers believe that writers should be allowed to use whatever tools are available to them as long as their content is original.
Really interesting question and I can see both sides.
After all, it's arguably only one step away from Grammarly correcting errors and otherwise fine-tuning your writing. I don't personally use it but I know people who swear by it. And presumably almost no one would consider that cheating.
Isn't it a grey line whether GPT-3 creates an original work or a derivative of potentially thousands of works?
There was the famous example where Copilot regenerated some John Carmack code verbatim with cussing comments, presumably because that code had been copied many times already.
Somewhere I read about GPT-3 committing clear plagiarism in English text, too, i.e. drawing way too much from one source and reproducing it.
AIs can’t have copyright. So it’s not even cheating. They just used tools is all. If the rules say you can’t use an AI (maybe spellcheck, depending how define AI and grammar check would be cheating), then it would be cheating.
I don't think the notion of copyright enters into it at all. Schools generally have policy to the effect that anything submitted must be the student's own work, not that another entity cannot have copyright over it. You couldn't submit out-of-copyright text without attribution, either.
As the parent said, plagiarism has very little to do with copyright or legalities. If a human essay farm assigns the copyright of what they've written to you--which is very common in a work for hire situation--it's still cheating in the eyes of pretty much any school.
ADDED: There is a degree of I know cheating when I see it. But, absent specific instructions to the contrary, spell checkers and grammar checkers/recommenders seem to fall pretty clearly into the assistive tools category whereas GPT-3 does not.
The author still had to write the prompt, edit it, etc. these are still skills that are (imho) more valuable than the writing itself. It is no more “assistive” than turning “waht” into “what”. In both cases the computer must infer what I mean and replace it with the appropriate string.
Legalities do matter here. The definition is “taking someone else’s work.” AI (currently) has no rights and no ownership. It is an “it” and not a “someone.” You are using a tool, an advanced tool that should be dealt with on a case by case basis. IOW, “don’t bring a graphing calculator.”
No, this does not enter into it at all. The universities set their assessment policies how they see reasonable, and will generally not allow auto-generated text. Just like it is not illegal to have a smartphone in an exam, but you can still be failed for it if it’s against the rules of the university.
Not to be tooo pedantic, but you agree spellcheck is against the rules? It’s “auto-generated text.”
But it appears we are on the same page. If it’s directly against the rules, that’s different (like bringing an advanced calculator to an elementary math exam). But it def isn’t plagiarism.
You can argue that it is no different than spell check and grammar check. It takes your inaccurately written text and turns it into accurate text. It doesn’t generate anything from thin air, so no. It isn’t “algorithmic output” unless we want to consider other tools as “algorithmic output” as well.
Spellcheck works (and often fails) at the level of individual words. Grammar checkers involve more extensive sets of relationships, typically at the level of a sentence, but are still limited to parts-of-speech agreement, relationships, tenses, and the like.
GPT-3 is constructing entire narratives from prompts. It operates at the level of multiple sentences and paragraphs, to the scope of an entire essay itself. Based on a provided prompt, it generates an essay.
By your same logic, an instructor assigning a class essay would be considered the author of those essays as that instructor had generated the prompt.
Moreover, as a matter of pedagogy, where a course either assigns group work (such that multiple students are contributing to an essay), or requires drafts and reviews with an instructor, TA, or other students as part of the overall essay-writing assignment, those become acknowledge parts of the process. In the case of the draft / review / revise cycle, it would seem that that is one way of putting a check on AI-generated essays, at least for now, as though generators can follow prompts, they're rather more limited in taking criticism well, and adapting to it.
> By your same logic, an instructor assigning a class essay would be considered the author of those essays as that instructor had generated the prompt.
Hol up, didn't you just describe academic research?! Sounds like we're on the right path here.
A few of us got away with it in the early 90's reciting Spin Doctors and Metallica lyrics. The trick was to use a deep cut. I don't think the teacher would have even recognized a radio single, but she may have picked up on all our poems being "verse verse chorus verse chorus"!
For something that I knew would be challenging, I threw the first 4 lines of Howl at it and got:
Paraphrased:"I have seen the best hearts of my generation destroyed by madness and hysterically naked and hungry,
Going through Negro Street at dawn, looking for a ferocious solution,
An angel-headed hipster, burning on a machine at night, after an ancient celestial connection to a dynamo in the starry sky.
In the supernatural darkness of a cold-water apartment floating on the roof of the city thinking of jazz, a poor, tattered, dented eye smoker"
Original:" I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz"
I was expecting basically thesaurus substitutions, and that is mainly what it did. However, there was some amount of sentence reordering as well. Not sure this would pass plagiarism detection tools though. However, I chose something specifically difficult to paraphrase, and honestly the results aren't bad.
A middle school classmate once turned in an article from Encarta as their essay for Social Studies. They didn’t copy paste the text… they literally printed the article, crossed out “Microsoft Encarta” with a pencil and then wrote their name at the top.
I was impressed with how little effort they put in. Teacher gave them an F of course.
We used to rick roll teachers by pretending to copy paste from the internet by writing "Please click here for more information" somewhere in the text.
I haven't thought about that in about 15 years and just started laughing to myself about the time my English teacher was struggling to turn the volume off during study hall as Rick Astley sang almost the entire song at full volume.
In the 90s, I remember there being a piece of student work pinned to the public display board (this only happened to the best work). It had blue links in it. Either the teacher who marked and choose it had no clue what that meant or had no fucks to give, not sure which.
Thinking back to when I was a student I wonder - do you think your classmate thought they were being funny, or were they legitimately not considering the teacher would notice?
A lot of uni exams are bullshit because they're drafted by overworked and underpaid TAs and some (particularly undergrad) professors just don't give enough of a shit to really rewrite their exams.
I took a class on logistics as part of my major, and our course professor was rotating an exam he had given three years prior, with weirdly dated examples and all.
I've encountered this twice in my life. The first time it was during a midterm where I studied 100 problems in an obscure topic, and it so happen that the midterm was one such problem. The second was even more ridiculous, it was during a job interview where I googled "XYZ interview questions" for each technology listed in the job description. 95% of my questions were from the top 10 search results lol.
This happened to me. For my Ophthalmology paper, I reviewed all Multiple Choice Questions given at the end of a popular Ophthalmology text book. All multiple choice questions in the test were lifted verbatim from this section of the text book. I got a very good score on the test.
> What does upset me is a simple fact: No one contacted me about this.
> Not Bello herself, not the staff at LitHub, not the journalist who wrote the Gawker piece and not even any of the readers of that piece. While I clearly found it fine on my own, the fact that there has been zero outreach is, in a word, surprising.
Because few people care about the victim, and everyone seems to obsess over the perpetrator.
I don't know how well the far more severe crimes in our society map in this context, but at least with serial or spree killings, there's an effort to take attention away from the perpetrator due to media fixation on them and instead redirecting it towards healing the injuries (https://www.dontnamethem.org/). I don't think it's exactly 1 for 1, but I think the sociological mechanics are probably the same here:
If it's not local to the reader, the reader is more likely to be fascinated by the perpetrator rather than go out of their way to heal the injured, or learn from the happening in any tangible way.
TBH this is because the main victim of plagiarism is usually not the original author. The usual case is some student doing it to gain a qualification, and the victims are the people who trust that the qualification was obtained honestly and the other students who took the time to do honest work only to be out competed by someone more "productive". There, the person copied probably does not know or care.
Here, where it's done in a published work, the original author can be aggrieved that they didn't get a citation (or in rare cases, royalties) but mostly it's the publisher and readers who are being let down.
I guess the main case where there is a serious injury to the original author is where they were not famous and the plagiarist is, and the original author gets suspected of being the plagiarist
I was thinking today about George Floyd when there was a phenomenon of people calling Derek Chauvin's trial the "George Floyd trials".
I wonder if the "Say His Name" protests actually caused that to happen since it was a rare case where we heard George Floyd's name so much he became the main character of that story in our minds.
I think that in many cases the victim's name gets remembered.
The Atlantic has an article in the current issue mentioning Medgar Evers. As it happens, I do remember the name of the man who shot Evers, was acquitted then and convicted thirty or forty years later. But I have to fish in my memory for it. I certainly don't remember the names of the Manson adherents who killed Sharon Tate, a bit later in the 1960s.
Not really honestly. I’m gonna make a honest guess and say no one really thought that, if you didn’t know what that trial was at that time, you genuinely had to have been living under a rock.
I wonder why you’d think, even after a rare murder conviction of a cop, that the murder victim being the “main character” is odd. The trial isn’t the “story”, only its conclusion.
It's further interesting because Gawker went as far as to edit their original piece, at the end of it, to mention that he reached out to them to clarify that he wrote both pieces himself.
They don't even include a link to his piece on Plagiarism Today about the issue, despite linking to LitHub's statement about the issue in a separate edit.
Ian Betteridge (of Betteridge's Law fame) once described this to me as "Journalists pick up the phone": which is to say, if you're claiming to be committing journalism, you call (or message) everyone that you're talking about -- for comment, for their side of the story, to correct or challenge your facts.
It's pretty unpleasant and chastening a lot of the time, and you have to develop a hard skin for cold-calling and being blown off, or having people vent at you. But if you don't do it, you don't know all the angles, and you haven't finished your job.
I have definitely noticed the perpetrator fixation; I always thought it was an attempt to respect the privacy of the families rather than obsession. But in this specific case -- and I'm not trying to be sarcastic here -- could the lack of contact to the victim be a result of there being no citation, instead? Not enough people knowing who the victim was, perhaps in combination with the bystander effect? I have no experience in the industry so I don't know if it'd be likely, but it seems plausible.
In order to call it plagiarism in print without risk of libel, you have to be able to identify what was plagiarized. Unless it was published anonymously, that means you know from whom it was stolen.
In my first year of college I had to write a short essay for an English course. I was rather lazy as well as a fan of wordplay so I wrote an essay describing the life and work of an obscure 19th-century philosopher, who also happened to be completely fictional. Since I could just pull the "facts" out of my ass, it was easy to write.
A week later I was called in by the English department and had a sit down with two grim looking teachers. They confronted me with suspicions of plagiarism. Most of their case was built on my use of the word "gamut", which they thought a 19-year-old non-native speaker was not supposed to know. I was incensed (as well as flattered), but they only relented after I pointed out that the essay was an acrostic. The first letters of the paragraphs spelled the word "humbug".
This is something most people who have never learnt a foreign language don't get, but usually the fancier the word sounds, the more likely it comes straight from Greek or Latin and to be pretty much the same in your native language.
For example: a native Italian speaker who is not very fluent in English will first think of velocity rather than speed, because speed is velocità in Italian.
Also, I've found that many non-english speakers learn a lot of their vocabulary from written sources, and so use "fancier" words than many of us native speakers would.
It reminds me of time a colleague was on the bus. Someone pressed the bell to stop when they didn't mean to. A voice with a strong foreign accent piped up from the back "I apologies, I depressed the indicator but do not wish to alight". It was absolutely perfect english that no native speaker would utter.
I always struggled with the formal and informal forms in French and later when I was trying to learn Japanes, and tended to err on the side of the formal, so I'm sure I'd have sounded similar.
English has a vast vocabulary of words and phraseology that most native speakers would never or rarely use in everyday speech--and mostly wouldn't in non-literary writing (and even then). Get into the really less common words and even very literate English speakers probably don't know and would certainly never use a fairly large swath of English vocabulary (e.g. the words in Merriam-Webster or the OED). And that's not even getting into slang which is often specific to subcultures or a particular age group.
It is easier to adopt words into English because English has so few inflections. If it's a noun, you need to be able to add an -s to the end. If it's a verb, you need to add -s, -ed, and -ing. And because the spelling is so random you don't need to make any other changes: just throw it in there. People will probably pronounce it wrong until it becomes widely adopted, like lieutenant, at which point however they're pronouncing it is the correct pronunciation in English (and it may, like lieutenant, have different correct pronunciations in different dialects).
I suspect this contributes to the size of the English lexicon.
It's hard to say because of things like technical words and slang that isn't in an official dictionary but the Wikipedia article [1] suggests that English is on the high side. (The Wictionary reference for English is a bit higher than the number or words in either MW or OED.) One thing that probably drives word count in English is it has many cases where there are multiple words with similar meanings derived from French/Latin and German-like respectively.
My opposite of plagiarism anecdote, where I still didn't do the work but got credit for it.
When I went to High School in Utah it was after going to a really advanced Junior High in Oregon, and I was very spoiled and felt that the work was boring and beneath me.
One of the classes I took I should have been grateful for as a dream class for a kid like me, it was a class on reading Science Fiction and Fantasy where you had to write a book report on the books read (once a week, once every two weeks? don't remember, maybe once per month).
I generally read a book every day or two, and I wrote quite quickly so it shouldn't have been difficult. But I found these book reports difficult to write because they had a template for how they wanted the reports written that I found insulting to the books I had read, if I had read a book I liked I didn't want to insult it that way, and if I read a book I didn't like I didn't want to think about it any more.
So I hit on the expedient solution of writing book reports on fake books, I don't remember any of the books other than one that was a stereotypical Fantasy quest to stop the dark lord thing, called "The Hinterlands of Horlon" ugh, of course I gave it a negative review with some bright spots just keep anyone from being interested in reading it.
Borges absolutely would not stop doing this [2]. His reasoning was that writing whole books was a lot of work, whereas writing book reviews was much easier, and let you get much the same ideas across [1]:
It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that these books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. That was Carlyle’s procedure in Sartor Resartus, Butler’s in The Fair Haven—though those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.
Well, since I wrote essays saying the books sucked to make sure that nobody would think, damn, I gotta read that book - no.
Although I do have some books I have written there is not much money in being an author unless one succeeds wildly and so I have not put the effort into publication as that is not the interesting part of writing.
I find I do that when my speed of thought outpaces my rate of typing. I "know" the words are there in that they're part of the sentence I intend to type, but I'm not closely enough attending what my hands are typing to notice they didn't come out.
Worse is when you spend a bunch of time rewording an email to upper management or an important stakeholder making sure they don't get the wrong idea or misinterpret your words, re-read it several times, hit send, then check your sent items and notice words missing :')
I wonder if proofing it by ear via TTS might make stuff like this easier to catch. The "come back and reread in half an hour" method doesn't always, unfortunately.
Read it backwards. Start at the end, and read word for word, just in reverse order. This forces you to slow down enough that you end up processing single words rather than sentences and phrases. As a result, you can notice misspellings and missing words more easily than while reading normally.
incidentally, chrome has an integrated proofreader now! i was pleasantly surprised when i saw the feature. doubly so when it said it's the same one gmail uses.
I make these kinds of writing mistakes constantly, but especially when writing on a phone (like now) where my thumb doesn’t come anywhere close to keeping up with my thoughts. Somehow I often don’t see them even when I reread what I wrote…it’s like my mind fills in the words so completely that it is unable to detect that they are missing.
> Bello was a hotly anticipated new author that was preparing to publish her first book
I don't know anything about the inner workings of the biz. How does someone who hasn't published her first book yet become hotly anticipated? I get the second book being hotly anticipated, but the first?
The process of getting a first novel published goes something like this (I'm eliding a lot of the hard work involved to be able to answer the question and failure to progress can happen at any stage of the process):
1. Write the book
2. Query agents until someone agrees to represent you.
3. After development work between agent and author,¹ the agent will then shop the work around to one or more editors at publishing houses.
4. If multiple editors are interested in purchasing the work, there can either be an auction where they bid to publish the work or an editor can issue what’s called a pre-empt where before it can go to auction, they’ll offer a large advance hoping to guarantee their house gets the book.
It’s the multiple editors interested in the work that generates most of the pre-publication buzz for a debut author. Yes, it can help to have published some prominent short works before the first novel, but it’s exceedingly rare for someone to gain much notice from this. Outside of a very short list of prominent magazines (the big national mags: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s plus a very short list of smaller publication The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s), the sad truth is that most of the readers of literary magazines are writers² and maybe literary agents scouting for new talent.³ When someone without at least an agent if not a previously published book has a story in The New Yorker, it’s a major event which was at least in part why “Cat People” was such a big deal when it was published a couple years back.
⸻
1. Starting in the 80s, this has become increasingly where a lot of editorial work on fiction happens.
2. This is the big conundrum for publishers of said magazines and a generally unspoken but widely acknowledged reality. I have an incubating project that will maybe with a few years’ of cultivation, expose a small number of non-writers to some of the best stuff available online.
3. The magazines that agents look at is not much longer than the first list. Looking at the table of contents of the past few years’ Best American Short Stories will surface almost all of the magazines in agents’ reading lists.
>I have an incubating project that will maybe with a few years’ of cultivation, expose a small number of non-writers to some of the best stuff available online.
I'd be interested in this, since I enjoy short stories as an art form but discoverability is poor. Any current recommended resources for finding short works? I don't care about hipster cred for 'discovering' an author, just for finding new short literary fiction that isn't being published in the major magazines.
I like the annual prize anthologies (for short fiction, that would be Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology (the last includes poetry and essays, and genre identifications are sometimes incorrect). I also get recommendations from writers that I follow on Twitter. My incubating project has my own recommendations showing up little by little at https://litjunction.com (anyone who wants an invite can email me at don.hosek@gmail.com and I'll throw one out—right now I’m focusing on making sure that as much of the lobste.rs excess as possible is pulled out of the site but I can handle a small influx of new contributors/commenters etc.)
That was my first question too. I guess samatman is probably correct, this is what the old boys club looks like when it is not just old and boys. We are not part of the "in" group, so we just don't see the noise.
When necessary, I happily plagiarize answers from Stackoverflow the whole day long.
However, I shy away from recursive structures.
They may be meta and cool but not always efficient.
I was once approached by a young job recruiter.
Since I am a fan of literary and linguistic issues and he had a master's degree in German studies, I googled for his master's thesis.
Interesting topic, which I will leave unnamed here because....
Because I found an Austrian bachelor's thesis posted online ten years before this master's thesis, by a different person but with the same topic.
And in my opinion with a quite similar structure and analog passages.
Since my interest was piqued, I researched further and found the doctoral thesis of the professor who had supervised the master's thesis.
Another twenty years older.
It was based on the same book as the master's thesis and the baccalaureate thesis with a broadly related topic, though of course much more in-depth and expanded.
Unfortunately, the book was not 'Felix Krull'.
All three writings, however, were, in my opinion, excellent in terms of craftsmanship.
As Nietzsche taught us, nothing is true everything is permitted.
> At the time, she told herself, “I’m just borrowing and changing the language. I will rewrite these parts later during the editorial phase. I will make this story mine again.”
We are taught how to plagiarise at university; where it is encouraged, and, you are marked on how well you do it. Paraphrasing is demanded of you. Repeating in your own words the content of other sources. Good marks for regurgitating the ideas of others with a false patina of creativity: rephrasing, synthesizing and summarizing your source material.
It is a foul process with a false idol at its core: placing dishonest "creativity" on a pedestal, artistic license instead of honest copying of the source material, a sham instead of giving the source proper recognition.
The real world mostly values execution, not a conceptual hall of mirrors, not ideas continuously warped and reflected with gross academic variations.
Edit: "Plagiarise in your own words (citation please)" would be a way to say it ;-)
I don't know how your university classes were taught, but in the liberal arts courses I took that would have been a huge no-no. Citations aren't just for direct quotations, they're for any and all ideas.
Which means that pretty much any factual claim you make needs a citation, any third party interpretations require a citation, and if your essay is just a laundry list of citations, you failed to actually write an essay.
*Restate and reorder*
Use these sentence starters to repackage the sentence
Change the order of the sentence
A thesaurus is a useful tool here
*Paraphrasing step by step*
This step by step process can be used to put the ideas of other authors into your own words.
1. Write down or paste a photocopy of the passage.
2. List some key ideas, concepts, and phrases from the passage.
3. Where possible, note down alternative phrases or synonyms for each of these.
4. Rewrite, using those alternative words and phrases.
5. Can you simplify further?
6. Insert the name of the author.
I have seen the above be enforced by “anti-plagiarism” tools for undergrad essays. Students are well taught to copy and remix statements, albeit with a reference. However the original statement by an author or authors would often better be copied verbatim. The implied morals that are taught for creative rewriting (for its own sake) are subconsciously learnt by students.
Rewriting to improve can be worthwhile. Forced rewriting teaches strange outcomes. My suspicion is that the plagiariser from the article went through the university process and has learnt some of their behaviour from that process.
That's horrendous. I am surprised that a university would advise their students to do that.
What exactly do they think is the intellectual value of rearranging words and substituting synonyms? Calling that synthesis and summation is like pushing bricks around in a circle and calling it construction.
That's not plagiarism, that's (cited) paraphrasing. In this case, the author of the original work is explicitly named. It's literally step one in the link that you just posted.
Plagiarism is taking someone else's work and presenting it as your own, original, work. The two are fundamentally different. Confusion between them is the essence of the problem at hand.
The person I'm replying to dropped in "albeit with a reference" as if that's not the critical point.
If the author referred to in the original article had cited the plagiarism website, there would be no issue here whatsoever. It's the misrepresentation of others' ideas and rhetoric as one's own (paraphrased or otherwise) that's the problem here.
Hold on, that is not the same thing "rephrasing, synthesizing and summarising your source material" (your words) is not plagiarism and is an important skill and if the source is appropriately given is not plagiarism. Still you are correct plagiarism education is often very bad.
Sentence manipulations can be performed without understanding anything of the material. The end result is the same thing as plagiarism, and isn't an important skill at all except if you try to get credit for work that wasn't yours. Many just spends their entire education getting better and better at transforming sentences and learns a lot of word/sentences equivalencies to take that even further, these are the people who can talk "intelligently" about coding problems without being able to code. Basically human form of GPT3.
It was saying "rephrasing, synthesizing and summarising your source material", which is very different than just sentence manipulation. In order to synthesize and summarize you need to understand the material.
To use a coding equivalent, to refactor code you have to understand it. Refactoring is not the same as rearranging some functions and moving some arguments around.
If you try to rephrase something you don't understand you will eventually drop a massive clanger that any teacher who actually reads your work will notice. Once you get into enough detail, the easiest way to pretend to understand the material is to actually understand it.
Counterpoint: If I read a paper from a field I'm not an expert in, I certainly value an eloquent summary of the state of the art in the author's words (supported, of course, by plenty of citations). You will not achieve a coherently structured introduction if you limit yourself to the exact phrases found in source material (and especially if you require that each source material be quoted verbatim at least once).
Whilst both are perhaps technically "plagiarism in your own words", there's a difference in trying to convey the same information in a sentence or two you've read in a text book into your own words for an essay, than rephrasing paragraphs/pages/story lines from a novel or entire sections of a previous work.
The process should be: 1) read 2) summarise into bullet points 3) write in your own words. Not 1) copy paste entire paragraph 2) rephrase/reorder to "make it yours"
The only thing that's not supposed to be cited in a scholarly essay is original, by-the-author interpretation, analysis, and argument. If you're describing a summary of something, that absolutely needs a citation.
I would argue that Tools like turnitin et al and their use of a "plagiarism score" are at least partially to blame. Teachers already in high-school seem to often tell students to self check and that "a score above 20" (arbitrary number) will result in a fail, as if some percentage of plagiarism is ok.
I was shocked when I took over a thesis course and students were asking what was the acceptable score. They also told me that students had failed previously due to a too high score because turnitin picked up the reference list as plagiarised. Now this is clearly the fault of teachers, but the increasing demands on them, plus the turnitin advertising to easy the burden by making this score is also partly to blame IMO.
I didn't even know it is possible to reliability get turnitin scores to be lower than 20. It always marks my entire references section as plagerized, resulting a score of 20%-30%.
This is adjacent, but I’ve wondered how close we are to having these automated plagiarism detection systems start identifying large numbers of false positives. Especially as they adopt machine learning, and they let their fuzzy matches get a little more aggressive.
Part of the problem with plagiarism in the abstract is that much of the work being submitted is not novel. Every one of us has been taught to read something, and then regurgitate it in a mildly different form to prove our successful learning of it. And our schools are spending tax dollars to buy access to these systems.
> This is adjacent, but I’ve wondered how close we are to having these automated plagiarism detection systems start identifying large numbers of false positives. Especially as they adopt machine learning, and they let their fuzzy matches get a little more aggressive.
"how close we are" ...? The automated plagiarism engines have always had huge amounts of false positives. Essentially they are only useful for highlighting what they detected. Some of the things that I have seen them false detect: Direct cited quotes, common phrases and sentence structures. Factual explanations, e.g. a description of a specific aperatus which can only really be described in one way (even though exact wording differed). Reference lists, this was by far the most common reason for very high turnitin scores, when I used it turnitin was completely unable to pick up a reference list.
The plagiarism scores of these systems are completely useless, I've found obvious plagiarism in work with scores of less than 3% (which is a very common score even if you would write an essay now) while I've had work with scores of >50% which were completely fine. Any teacher who uses the turnitin score for anything should be fired IMO, because they do not understand plagiarism.
Back in my high school days we used a platform called TurnItIn which gave our writing a 'plagarism score'-too high and we'd need to rewrite the essay. It would flag silly things like two word fragments sometimes. I remember writing a strenuous objection because the license agreement (which I read because I was a bit of a stallmanite at the time) allowed the platform to publish our writing. In effect, they could supply plagiarism sites and then sell you the solution!
Since my Twitterverse is all writers, there was a lot of talk about this. The Arby’s thing was half-true and would have fooled me if this story wasn’t the actual answer.
In Bello’s article, for example, she wrote the following:
Plagiarism has been with us since the birth of language and art. For as long as there have been words to be read, there has been someone there copying the passages. It goes as far back as 8 AD with the poet Martial who caught another poet Fidentinus reciting his work. He called Fidentinus a plagiarus, meaning a “kidnapper.”
Compare that to this 2011 article in Plagiarism Today, titled “The World’s First ‘Plagiarism’ Case.”
Plagiarism, the act of taking another’s work and passing it off as your own, has almost certainly been with us since the dawn of artwork and written language. For as long as there has been art and artists, there have been people who have put their name to it incorrectly.
But while the act of plagiarism is as old as time, the word “plagiarism” is not. The etymology of the word plagiarism is an interesting one and its history actually dates back to the first century AD and involves a Roman poet and his literary “kidnappers” who became the subject of a literary beating.
Yea, it's paraphrasing. But it's still a terrible way to write. Bello's version even contradicts itself giving 8 AD as the beginning of plagiarism, not the origin of the word. That's what happens when you paraphrase by reshuffling the words instead of creating new writing from the information that's in your head.
It doesn't seem like paraphrasing to me. I can imagine two people writing about this same topic coming up with both of those examples independently. Bello's paragraph includes specifics that aren't even in the supposed source.
They're not written completely differently. They share the same structure and cover the same content using the same rhetorical devices. The fact that they use different words does not diminish the fact that this is plagiarism.
two articles written about plagiarism will invariably have similar contents. Especially information about the origin of the word. The structure only seems loosely similar to me.
The story about how Jumi Bello ended up plagiarizing her way through college and a Iowa Writer’s Workshop fellowship is interesting. Her debut novel and subsequent apology were not her first time plagiarizing.
She reportedly plagiarized during college, but was able to manipulate people into letting her get away with it. It would have been better to fail fast, fail early, recover soon, than to get away with plagiarism until this late in the game and then get caught so publicly.
Better for whom? Plagiarism is a pretty serious offense, and being willing to do it (whether you're a college "kid" or not) says something striking about your character, and something that I think should follow you for a long, long time, especially if you are trying to make a living in writing/publishing.
People learn. It is easier to learn to change your behavior when the consequences are low. Learning environments are constructed in such a way so that people can make mistakes and learn from them. The way it was described, it sounds like in college, the author would incorporate texts into her own work without citation. A likely consequence for this behavior, in college, is to fail the course.
Reportedly, she manipulated people into letting her get away with it. As a result, it was easier for her to believe that what she was doing was right.
> [...] being willing to do it (whether you're a college "kid" or not) says something striking about your character [...]
Character is somewhat malleable and most morals (like "do not plagiarize") must be taught. I agree with Xunzi's take on human nature here. At birth we are self-centered and have no moral compass. We have the capacity to become good people through education and discipline, although not everyone does.
> Plagiarism is a pretty serious offense, and being willing to do it (whether you're a college "kid" or not) says something striking about your character, and something that I think should follow you for a long, long time, especially if you are trying to make a living in writing/publishing.
I have not done it, but I'd be shocked if it wasn't the case that almost every college kid engages in plagiarism at least once. (Plagiarism includes downloading answers off Chegg and submitting them as your own, an activity sufficiently common that some of my students complained to me about the injustice of not getting points because the answer they copied off Chegg was wrong.)
Probably better for the perpetrator. If you think stealing is good idea, its better to learn that its not by getting caught stealing something small when you're young, than to be successful at it initially and getting caught later when the stakes are higher.
^That's a terribly written sentence but at least its not plagiarized
I can't imagine writing in the style that the guilty party utilizes. If I am writing a piece, it's either soulless corporate drivel or something I genuinely care about. My substack is not high-quality, but it's definitely me. I've never copy-pasted something there that wasn't in a block quote.
Just sits wrong that it's possible for people to do that and feel good about it.
> In short, Bello, an author who admitted to plagiarizing in her now-cancelled debut novel, wrote an article about the experience and, in that article, included poor paraphrasing without attribution of an article that I wrote over a decade ago.
When I was a teenager I collected a couple of head-scratchers like this. I’d say they were ironic but I’d be afraid of being wrong.
First: visited church with my grandparents, received a typewritten postcard a week or two later. Quote: “Thank you for visiting our church last Sinday.”
Second: was listening to my favorite radio station, a local university-run station. One of the students who ran it read an editorial about complaints regarding pronunciation. She defended the personalities, said they were after all just students.
The irony: she repeatedly mispronounced “mispronunciation”.
I was 14 at the time, so didn’t have the courage to call and point that out, but I have to assume someone did.
Written text quotations are so overly intrusive into prose. I'm totally onboard with wholesale sampling and remixing of other texts, but it is essential to provide a footnote marker on the text or something.
Personally, I love All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan and like the Jimi Hendrix version. And I love all these EDM remixes of the old classics. Losing my Religion hits different when it's powered by a sick beat.
Anyway, if there was just some pleasant way to remix by just sticking them in a chapter footnote or a page footnote rather than having to explicitly say "It's a lie to make up a text like BLOCKQUOTE As Ursula Le Guin says BLOCKQUOTE The moon is a harsh mistress is a terrible book especially when Heinlein says BLOCKQUOTE There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him"
You are supposed cite paraphrasings. If I say "A key concept in the philosophy of Existentialism is that awareness of one's own free is an uncomfortable experience, characterized by the three feelings of despair, forelorness, and anguish", then I should have an in-text citation (a footnote in the Chicago style, one of those parentheticals in MLA) referring to Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism essay.
Self-plagiarizing anecdote: in uni we had a subject called "Technical English" where we had to learn amazing words like "printer" among other things. Obviously nobody took it seriously. About 5 minutes before class I realized a short powerpoint presentation was due that day on some "technical subject".
Fortunately our teacher was substituted and we had done a presentation like it before. So I took my last presentation, changed the name to something vaguely different (as I knew it would be written down), repeated my last presentation word for word and no one was the wisest. Saw a few grins as my classmates started realizing what's going on ^^;
_edit_
I'm not from an English speaking country in case anyone is wondering.
A very common form of plagiarism on the Internet is people copying transcriptions of public-domain works without mentioning where they copied them from. You know it's happening because you see the same transcription errors repeated on dozens of web sites. (Of course there is no copyright violation here.)
A very common case of copying without attribution is in contracts and policies, which are nearly always adapted from existing documents. Probably this doesn't count as plagiarism because nobody expects these things to be original, authors are not named, and there is no tradition of citing sources. (However, in many cases it probably is copyright violation, even if nobody cares to complain about it.)
while it is clear that Bello borrowed the text from the blog, she did paraphrase it to a good degree. I struggle to call it plagiarism, but, yes, I would have definitely cited the original source.
The thing with plagiarism is that it's either (almost) verbatim or it's not plagiarism, because, otherwise, everything is plagiarism. That's how culture and ideas work.
That is incorrect in an academic context. Obviously different contexts have different expectations of citation and attribution, but plagarism is not just about infringing someone's copyright by stealing their work verbatim. It's about misrepresenting someone else's ideas/research/analysis as your own.
I can restate Plato's model of concrete things being mere shadows of abstract ideals however I damn well please, but if I don't mention that I got that idea from Plato, it's still plagarism.
My country's main writer took entirely the V act of Hamlet into their second chapter of his main novel. He's a Nobel, though. That's how culture runs, that how it works. Nobody can master words as Sh did. And he was so good at writing plays if and only if someone else wrote that play before, at least as a tale.
I plagiarized a few times in high school to get out of deadlines for work I didn't care to do. I would copy paste the the essay on Word from a CliffsNotes-type site and rewrite some of it, rearrange some sentences and insert typos to make it look legit. Got As and passed the class. This was a long time ago, before it was possible to easily check this stuff. But in college? no way. they are way smarter at checking that stuff. Considering how much businesses delegate, I don't see the harm of letting people do it it. I think it's only wrong if someone is paying for original content or there is the expectation of original content through the implicit trust between the reader and the writer.
> I plagiarized a few times in high school to get out of deadlines for work I didn't care to do.
One time pretty much all the kids in my Chemistry class copied my homework, at that time I had the reputation for knowing what I was doing.
Unfortunately there was a key error in one of my solutions, and all the other kids copied my solution faithfully - including the error.
The teacher figured out pretty quickly what had happened and decided on an unusual reponse. He corrected my solution fully ... in my book. In everyone else's book the only thing he wrote was:
I understand now that you meant your answer book for the exam under discussion, but for a moment I imagined that you were saying that you got away with it until much later, when your former professor was reviewing some professional published work of yours after the fact.
Looking at that again I really didn't choose my words very carefully, sorry. No published books here! Two exceeedingly minor scientific papers, but fortunately my misdeeds in school Chemistry were long forgotten by then.
OT but interestingly in German there's a clear distinction in such cases between the word "Buch" (= book, of the sort that you read from) and the word "Heft" (= exercise book, of the soft-bound variety that you write in).
Even if you're tempted to plagiarize in a business report, it seems far more useful to just include the link you're copying from as a citation anyway. It shows that you actually researched the topic instead of making it up.
One interesting aspect of plagiarism is self-plagiarism which is often OK but sometimes not. Copy over some boilerplate description or background to a new document sure. Even write a book that's draws in part from published blog posts? Sure, as long as you have the copyright.
(I once wrote a book that was based in part on reworked blog posts from various places. When I submitted for Kindle, it got flagged. But I submitted some links and everything was OK.)
On the other hand, if someone commissions me to write an article on something, I generally speaking shouldn't reuse much directly from past articles.
TL;DR: Author who earns a living documenting plagiarism commits to care more about the victims of plagiarism in the future after becoming one and discovering firsthand how little their side of the story is covered.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our many requests to stop. A partial list was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29191945, and you've continued to break the site guidelines a lot since then. That's seriously uncool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Most worthless obsession in the world. Imitation is the best form of flattery. If the issue is royalties/grants/ego, these days ML systems can easily detect significant copying and auto-attach credits. If you are riled up by a middle school student copying a paragraph of your prose for an assignment, get a grip!
It's about intellectual honesty. It should be unambiguous what parts of a creative work are actually your creativity, and what parts are borrowed from others.
Besides that, citations make a great way to pursue further reading. If an interesting idea gets mentioned in passing in an essay I'm reading, then if it's cited I can go read that other work. That's why you're supposed to cute your own works, when an idea in a given essay is just lifted from something else you wrote. I, as a reader, can then go check out that work, and in turn be lead to the ideas that helped shape that one by the citations in that work.
It's a bit ironic how the author talks about how to avoid plagiarism by not copying sections verbatim to later rewrite them, while at the same time the author seems to have done this himself, when taking passages from his history of plagiarism article for a piece he wrote for turnitin.
Now he was copying his own words, so the ethics are somewhat murkier. I would still argue it's bad form to do this for a work for hire like the turnitin piece. Moreover it seems he also does not follow his own advice of not taking passages from other texts for later rewriting.
I know it's generally frowned upon to comment on voting, but can someone explain why the downvotes? I'm really trying to understand what in the above warranted to be voted down.
I've noticed that there has been much more downvoting recently. The weird thing is that often posts a few levels down, in both sides of a discussion would get downvoted even though they seemed to make perfectly fine arguments (that I might have agreed or disagreed with). It almost feels like there is some bots that randomly apply votes in discussions.
Yeah they are bots really. Humans bots. 90% of population of whatever forum, pages, etc.How in the hell is plagiarism to "copy" ideas? Those people never have been read Sh.?
It just baffles how much effort as humans of modern education and academia have put into being super mad for using other people's ideas. Sure, I agree that this guy is somewhat the victim and she shouldn't have done that.
But really, how is it that we've come so far as a society and just scream at things like these ? Isn't knowledge supposed to be shared ? Even if it's not properly attributed ? There are plenty of misattributions in Mathematics, theorems who people did not create or develop at all, yet their name has been recited for years and years in elementary and middle schools. Yet teachers will say that plagiarism is bad! But hey, don't worry if we call this theorem like this because this is ok and it's actually not plagiarism. We're literally just regurgitating ideas, as several commenters have said (good luck getting the primary sources for my comment lol).
Also, should my ideas be considered plagiarized even when I thought of them before someone else published them ? Interesting dilema, at least for me.
In an academic context, plagarism enforcement is less about the theft of ideas (which are no less stolen when simply regurgitated with a citation next to them), than as it is about establishing a chain of influence.
If I write an article that uses someone else's ideas, then I cite them, so that a reader can go "huh, that idea's interesting, let me go see where that came from" and then they can see what influenced those ideas by that papers citations and so on and so on.
The fact that students don't have this concept of intellectual chain of custody hammered into their skulls is a failure of the education system. Citing quotes is obvious, but in this day and age it's probably the least necessary. I can Google an exact quote and find exactly the article it came from. Much harder to search is provinance of paraphrased idea or general concept, or the source of a factual statement that I find dubious.
> It just baffles how much effort as humans of modern education and academia have put into being super mad for using other people's ideas. Sure, I agree that this guy is somewhat the victim and she shouldn't have done that.
Degrees are awarded off the back of people producing work. If you reproduce another's work instead of creating something original, even if you then go on to make superficial modifications afterwards, you have not produced work and gaining qualifications off the back of that is fraudulent. Citations of sourced work, among other things, exist to declare the parts of work which are not your own.
Maybe use plagiarism to detect influence of thought & ideas as trees instead and reward accordingly? Problem is though, that rewards self-promoters instead of rigorous scientists.
>That is not how writing works, and it is an idea Bello needs to disabuse herself of. [1]
It's refreshing to see a lack of critique or commentary to the above statement with regards to gender, race, mental status, or any other categorization. But plagiarism does not appear to be a universal violation of ethics when discovered. [2]
"Victim" is an interesting word to use here. Is the author really a "victim?" I don't see how they have been hurt but can see how they have been helped by being plagiarised. I can see how someone stealing work and claiming it as their own and accepting the rewards of money & status they did not earn can cause someone to be a victim.
> I got an alert from WordPress that my site stats were “booming”.
Doesn't seem like it here.
Plagiarize! Let noone else's work evade your eyes. [1]
[1] Plagiarised because I'm not telling you where it's from. Wooo.
"Victim" of plagiarism should include the misled readers who are denied the context of the original work and the source, possibly to read further later.
Sure. But that is not how the word "victim" is being used in the piece.
I can see how the plagiarised person can be a victim, as I've said. Such a person could be deprived of money and status that is their due while it is garnered by the plagiarist. Morally that is straight up theft, for mine. I just don't see it, or much like it here. This is not a defense of plagiarisim that I'm making.
It's not a massive point and it definitely isn't terribly important. I just feel like it's describing yourself as a victim of theft if someone tries to break into your car, does no damage to it, fails to steal anything and accidentally leaves a few hundred dollar bills behind that are legally awarded to you as their finder. Victim? Maybe a professional writer could use a word to convey the meaning they're trying to convey without the nuance I'm objecting to here? Has there ever been an easier case to "refuse to be a victim" than this one? The plagiarised party is, in some small way, cashing in on the experience and good luck to them!
Seems like the plagiarist is getting some kind of justice and everyone can form their own view on the appropriateness of its roughness and whether no viable alternative to it exists and so on in the all the usual ways.
The fact that people care more about the perpetrators of plagiarism, than it's victim tells me it's not really a crime.
Think about it. If you saw someone holding a blood-covered knife in their hand, and an angry look on their face, you would be able to guess he/she committed a murder. But then, your next thought would be to know who was murdered?
But this does not seem to be the case with plagiarism. Perhaps because victim is not really the victim. It's just a way for people to obtain some schadenfreude. In the same way that the mob involved in a mob lynching does not do it for victim, or "justice", but plainly to get pleasure out of the act.
>But then, your next thought would be to know who was murdered?
Actually, no! Stories about murderers track way higher in news media than stories about the murdered. Especially when it's a particularly heinous spree killing.
Right now is the end of the school year for many schools in the USA. That makes it a time for final exams for many students. This week a student I know prepared for the Literature final by reading through the SparkNotes for the book they had read earlier. Then the student took some SparkNotes practice tests on the book. Then the student showed up to take the actual final exam.
The final exam was verbatim the SparksNotes practice test--uncredited.