How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really?
Wanna humanize? I could come over later, bring a few beers, and we could, you know, get down to some serious humanizing. Hard to resist, these days, given what’s at stake. For students with assignments to complete, who have already vanquished their desolation by asking ChatGPT to compose an essay on their behalf, a humanizer is an A.I. tool that takes what has been produced, puts it through a further digital mill, and makes it sound as if it had emerged from a verifiable person. Among the companies that offer such tools are StealthWriter, HIX AI, and QuillBot. (If Nabokov had written science fiction, his villain would have been called Quillbot.) Anyone who has buttered and blitzed a mountain of mashed potatoes into a purée will understand. It’s hard to live with the lumps.
What I find charming about the humanizers is how human they are—that is, with what cheerful candor they proceed on the assumption that, as fallen beings, we have no option but to cheat. Not only can we not think for ourselves, or write by ourselves; we really can’t help ourselves, either, so here comes technology to spare us the pain. As for the notion that we might forgo A.I. in the first place, relying instead on our own wits, and that such self-sufficiency might even be good for us, forget it. That’s like suggesting we learn to ride a penny-farthing, inhaling the sweet scents of the hedgerows as we pedal along.
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One of the knottiest problems in this vexing new field of endeavor concerns the relationship between A.I. and plagiarism. It could be argued that the two are nearly identical, given that artificial intelligence scrapes up immeasurably vast amounts of online data, like those trawlers that scour the seabed for shrimp and flatfish with weighted nets, and to hell with the natural habitat. A chatbot is not (or not yet) an individual, and therefore bears no moral responsibility, but to lay hold of what it delivers, and to pass it off as one’s own work, could be construed as handling stolen goods. That, at any rate, is a viewpoint that prevails at some of the sturdier colleges in the United States. The most robust that I have come across is San José State University, where the advice offered by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library is admirably clear: “It doesn’t matter which AI program/software you use. Using any of these to write your papers is considered a form of plagiarism.”
What plagiarism is and has been, and what it may be in the process of becoming, are questions addressed by Roger Kreuz in a bouncy new book titled “Strikingly Similar” (Cambridge). He defines plagiarism as “the deliberate appropriation of someone else’s words and ideas without acknowledgement or compensation.” Words and ideas? That’s quite a bundle. Also, as Kreuz rightly asks, how many words? Or, indeed, how many musical notes? He offers a peculiar example: when the Chiffons sang three notes, in a simple descent, at the start of their 1963 hit “He’s So Fine,” written by Ronnie Mack, few listeners foresaw that the sequence would form the nub of a legal dispute that would, absurdly, not be concluded until 1998. The issue was whether, when George Harrison sang the words “My sweet Lord,” in the 1970 song of that title, he was recalling, borrowing, swiping, unwittingly echoing, or accidentally mimicking Mack’s melodic phrase. The fact that the two songs were atmospherically far apart—the ex-Beatle robed his harmonies with a chant of “Hare Krishna”—was beside the point. To the victim, a transcendental thief is still a thief.
What kind of victim are you, though, when somebody summons the nerve to plagiarize you? You are physically intact. You haven’t lost a wallet, a diamond necklace, or a child. There could be a dent in your artistic pride, but it’s unlikely to hurt as much as a stubbed toe. Privately, you might even feel a trifle smug—flattered that your stuff should merit larceny. Maybe that is why neither Harrison nor any other Beatle was moved to protest when the spiky and urgent bass riff that introduces “Taxman,” on “Revolver,” appeared more or less intact at the start of “Start!,” the fifth track on “Sound Affects,” a 1980 album by the Jam. According to Bruce Foxton, the Jam’s bassist, “it wasn’t intentional, but ‘Taxman’ subconsciously went in.” As it happens, Foxton’s explanation comes uncannily close to the 1976 ruling of a New York judge, Richard Owen, who asserted that, although Harrison’s use of “He’s So Fine” had not been deliberate, “his subconscious knew it already.” Spooky.
It’s hardly news that the subconscious can exact a heavy cost, though even Freud would have raised an eyebrow at the amount—more than two million dollars—that Owen ordered Harrison to pay. (The amount was later reduced, but that was not, by a long stretch, the end of the affair.) So, given the resemblance, why weren’t the Jam in a pickle? Well, the Beatles didn’t need the money, even after paying what they considered too much in taxes, and it could be that homage, blatant or otherwise, struck them as their rightful due. Rare was the creative artist, post-1970, who wasn’t churned up by bobbing in the Beatles’ wake. Kreuz doesn’t mention the Jam in his book, but he does usher us through the Harrison case, arriving at a crux that will, God willing, never be neatly resolved:
Anybody who embarks on a study of plagiarism hoping for bright lines is in for a foggy shock. Here is the land of blur. Only intermittently in “Strikingly Similar” does an act of plagiarism stand out as conscious, unambiguous, and proud. If the book has a hero, it is a great man named Alfred J. Carter, whom Kreuz describes as “an unemployed welder,” and who, in 1949, “was caught when he tried to sell a Wordsworth poem to Good Housekeeping.” Which poem, and why did the killjoys at the magazine turn it down? Weren’t readers crying out for tips on how to make their daffodils golden and hostly? The more poetry that could be smuggled under their noses, by whatever means, the better their skill at keeping house. Earth has not anything to show more fair than the crust on a chicken potpie.
The range of “Strikingly Similar,” according to the subtitle, runs “from Chaucer to Chatbots.” The emphasis, however, is heavily on modern times. We get nothing of Samuel Johnson, who, while declaring plagiarism to be “one of the most reproachful, though, perhaps, not the most atrocious of literary crimes,” in an essay from 1753, was also typically generous in his plea for mitigation: “A coincidence of sentiment may easily happen without any communication, since there are many occasions in which all reasonable men will nearly think alike.” On the other hand, we do get Boris Johnson, who, it is alleged, based a 2019 Twitter thread on a lawyer’s anonymous blog post. Such is the glorious age in which we dwell.
There is a rough story line that relates to plagiarism, which goes as follows. Plagiaristic mischief did not exist—or, at least, did not exert such a grip on the collective conscience—before the Romantic era, with its pesky insistence upon “originality.” Before then, it was deemed not just defensible but natural that a person bent on creative deeds would proceed via imitation: you studied your models, learning to copy them and thus whetting the edge of your skill. Only then were you qualified to venture upon work of your own devising, which would, needless to say, continue to show evidence of its predecessors.
Staid though it sounds, this process bequeathed to us, in bulk, an unmanageable wealth of beautiful objects. At first glance, Raphael’s “Marriage of the Virgin,” from 1504, is pretty much a straight rehash of the same subject as painted in the preceding years by Perugino, to whom Raphael had been apprenticed. But a hundred glances, or more, are needed to calibrate what has changed: the way in which the presiding priest, mid-frame, cocks his head and animates the hitherto chilly symmetry of the composition; the elaborating of the temple behind him, with figures now filling two of its arches; and the tense spectacle of a suitor breaking a staff across his knee in frustration at being supplanted by Joseph. You find yourself bracing for the snap. (In the earlier painting, he bends the staff feebly over his thigh.) Was Perugino, the master overtaken by his pupil, similarly tempted to smash something? Or did he applaud this smooth showpiece of the imitative system at work? We don’t know. One thing he didn’t do, for sure, is take Raphael to court and sue his sneaky ass.
Jump ahead a hundred years or so, to 1602, and we find an Englishman named Thomas Lodge receiving an M.D. from Oxford University. He was a well-travelled soul, who had been as far as Brazil, and the author of “Rosalynde,” a popular proto-novel, bedecked with incident, and reputedly written at sea. It had been published in 1590; was Lodge now aware that it had, in the meantime, been ransacked for a recent play, “As You Like It”? There are imponderables here: we lack conclusive evidence that the play was even staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Nonetheless, there is no denying its piracy of the prose tale. True, Shakespeare had added the characters of Touchstone and Jacques, thus mocking the sport of love and misting it in disillusionment; but most of the plot is pure Lodge. If, by our standard, that is glaring plagiarism, the obvious retort is that the standard of the early seventeenth century was a very different beast. How different, though?
That is part of a sonnet by Ben Jonson, titled “On Poet-Ape.” It appeared in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. Whether or not the poem is about Shakespeare is a cause for scholarly debate, but what rises from it is anger. Jonson directs his scorn not only at plagiarists but at the average fool (“the sluggish gaping auditor”) who swallows their deceit. The same impatience lingers and spreads, thirty years later, through “Pseudodoxia Epidemica” (1646), a treatise by Sir Thomas Browne, who issues a peppery demand—“I wish men were not still content to plume themselves with others Feathers”—and makes the important point that we are dealing less with an annoying fad than with a permanent crack in human nature. “Plagiarie had not its Nativity with Printing, but began in times when thefts were difficult,” he writes.
In the light of such plaints, maybe we need to adjust the established narrative. There have always been picky souls, it seems, who do find fault with plagiarism, and who refuse to shrug it off as reverent emulation. It would be a mistake, certainly, to regard the miasmic anxiety that swirls around the subject of current plagiarism, facilitated by A.I., as unique to us; the technology is unprecedented, but not the temper. For a healthy perspective, I recommend a little time travel. Try Robert Macfarlane’s “Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature” (2007)—a dazzling dive into late-Romantic attitudes—or, for a longer journey, Scott McGill’s “Plagiarism in Latin Literature” (2012), which makes today’s plagiarists, and their enemies, look like milksops. I like the sound of Quintus Octavius Avitus, who apparently devoted eight volumes to showing what a chronic plagiarist Virgil was. Virgil! The historian Sallust, meanwhile, was lampooned by a guy named Lenaeus as “lastaurum et lurconem et nebulonem popinonemque,” which McGill translates as “catamite, glutton, scoundrel, barfly.” But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that he was a plagiarist.
One of the pleasing facets of plagiarism is that it doesn’t exist—not in the eyes of the law, that is, and especially not if those eyes are American. There is intellectual-property law, and a law that prohibits the trafficking of counterfeit goods. There are laws against copyright infringement. If plagiarists are sent to prison, however, it will not be because they have filched a slice of poetry, or half a juicy ballad, and passed it off as their own. Plagiarism, pace Dr. Johnson, is not a crime. It is a sin.
In the mind of the plagiarized, as often as not, what has been perpetrated is nothing less than an outrage. When the science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison watched James Cameron’s “The Terminator” (1984), he decided that the opening scene, of futuristic warriors battling in a broken landscape, with lasers blazing, was and could only be a ripoff of “Soldier,” a twenty-year-old episode of “The Outer Limits” whose script he had written. Charges were levelled. The studio behind the movie, Orion Pictures, settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, and, since then, the end credits of the film have displayed the uneasy wording “Acknowledgment to the works of Harlan Ellison.” An unhappy Cameron was quoted as saying, “It was a real bum deal, I had nothing to do with it and I disagree with it,” though at least he had the satisfaction of seeing his movie improve a thousandfold on the TV show. As far as the law is concerned, though, bum deals are a twilight zone.
Someone who has pondered such niceties is Richard Posner, a former circuit judge and a prolific legal scholar. Rarely is Posner unamused, you sense, by the briars of confusion through which he undertakes to cut a path, and “The Little Book of Plagiarism” (2007) finds him at his most incisive. We get hushed in-jokes (“judicial acknowledgement of ghost authorship by law clerks is vanishingly rare”), plus knuckle raps for his peers (“judges will sometimes call copyright infringers ‘plagiarists,’ though there is no concealment”), but what lends the book its kick is the unwearying zest with which Posner defines and redefines his terms until they agree, for the moment, to hold still. He proposes that one way to treat plagiarism is as “nonconsensual fraudulent copying,” and the phrase, though it stumbles rather than trips off the tongue, strikes me as usefully cautious.
Now and then, Posner branches out from the main line of his thesis into the psychology of plagiarism—the motives both of those who fall into it, as if it were an addiction, and of those who expose it. “By far the most common punishments for plagiarism outside the school setting have nothing to do with law,” he writes. “They are disgrace, humiliation, ostracism, and other shaming penalties imposed.” Why should this be? In part, according to Posner, because plagiarism is “embarrassingly second rate; its practitioners are pathetic, almost ridiculous.” By this token, the politician who steals scraps of another’s rhetoric (even if the actual stealing is performed by speechwriters) is derided as if he had been found watching pornography. I would go further than Posner and suggest that it’s precisely because there are no plagiarism laws that the surrounding area is such a free-for-all. Without the barriers of legislation, the brawl spills out of control.
In the absence of cops, you get vigilantes, and Kreuz has a fine chapter, “The Plagiarism Hunters,” that details the thrilling activities of the truth-tracking industry. This has become quite the rage since Posner’s book came out, almost twenty years ago. We learn of a graduating senior at Parkersburg High School, in West Virginia, who discovered that a commencement address given, in 2019, by the principal, Kenneth DeMoss, bore an ominous resemblance to a speech delivered by Ashton Kutcher “in accepting Nickelodeon’s 2013 Teen Choice Ultimate Choice Award.” And you thought Virgil was a crook. DeMoss was suspended for five whole days without pay, we learn, while his accuser was attacked for ratting him out. (Such minor-league meanness begs to wind up in a novel.) Kreuz neglects to tell us whether Kutcherology studies have since boomed, but, thanks to his efforts, I am now aware of VroniPlag Wiki, “a crowdsourced collaboration established to ferret out and expose plagiarism in German dissertations.” Boy, do those Volk know how to have fun.
Go beyond online sleuthing and you come to something older and infinitely odder: the plagiarism hound whose very snarling is a work of art. The name Ivan Goncharov does not appear in “Strikingly Similar,” and that’s a pity, because he shakes up every discussion of the plagiaristic impulse. Goncharov’s fame rests solidly on “Oblomov,” his 1859 novel about a man so steeped in apathy that one of his heroic endeavors consists of simply getting out of bed. Less well known is “An Uncommon Story,” which was written some years before Goncharov died, in 1891, and not published until 1924. The book is mad, and all the madder for being unsmilingly sincere. The method of the madness is plain: Goncharov claims to have been plagiarized, with ever greater cunning and mendacity, by Ivan Turgenev, who once had been his friend. Specifically, “Home of the Gentry,” Turgenev’s most graceful novel, is said to have been extruded, without shame, from Goncharov’s “Malinovka Heights,” despite the fact—and this is where the pathology of jealousy grows truly inspired—that the latter came out ten years after the former. To Goncharov, the inconvenient chronology proves his point; in conversation, he says, he had freely mentioned his plans for various characters and concepts, only for Turgenev to squirrel them away and then plant them in his own fiction, making sure to publish first, and thus preëmpting charges of plagiarism. Dastardly! See how the Devil works:
Got that? By rights, “An Uncommon Story” should be unreadable, yet it is saved by the sheer stamina of its arraignment. No sadness mars the purity of its paranoia. In the mouth of a master like Goncharov, crying foul at the sight—or, at any rate, the perception—of plagiarism acquires an astounding verve. Stolen jewels can do wonders for the imagination, even if they are tucked away in a safe.
Is there such a thing as good plagiarism? Can you sin your way into redemption? Academically, no; the call for honest and accurate citation of one’s sources will, and must, ring out as forcefully as ever. The blandishments of digital reproduction, whereby cutting and pasting is less bother than blowing your nose, and smart glasses can be instructed to photograph whatever lies within your vision, do not augur well, and the penultimate page of “Strikingly Similar” finds Kreuz in dark prophetic mode. “The consumption of intellectual property without paying for it,” he writes, “may function as a gateway drug that normalizes the act of appropriation.”
If that is the shape of things to come, it will be comically hard to police. Give me raiders of the lost past, any day, and forgive them their lack of footnotes. I remember listening to “Bedtime Stories,” Madonna’s 1994 album, and being surprised by a moony track called “Love Tried to Welcome Me,” which contains the lines “But my soul drew back, / Guilty of lust and sin.” This is an unacknowledged but unmistakable nod to George Herbert, one of the most enduring religious poets of the early seventeenth century, who wrote a magnificent poem that begins “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” How Herbert, who was an Anglican priest of surpassing gentleness, might have felt about being quoted, three and a half centuries later, by somebody with a Catholic name and a conical bra we shall, alas, never know. The most gratifying irony is that, in changing the mortally ashen “dust” to the cheaper and more obvious “lust,” Madonna proved only that Herbert wrote better lyrics than she did, and I can’t help wishing that she had turned to him more often for guidance both verbal and spiritual. Papa does preach.
The safest form of plagiarism, by common consent, is self-plagiarism. Only the very determined would have the courage to sue themselves, although I’m sure that Goncharov would have got around to it eventually. Kreuz allows himself a brief interlude on the matter, breezing past rumors of self-plagiarism in the work of Kelly Clarkson and Puccini before bumping into the saintly figure of Charles M. Schulz, and, in particular, into a Snoopy strip from 1996 that was, Kreuz tells us, barely distinguishable from an earlier one, from 1987. Good grief! Is that it? Could it be that self-plagiarism, far from being a lapse into rote and repetition, is practiced by every writer, composer, and painter of the first rank? Borrowing your own creations, investing them anew, and turning a fresh profit is the business of the alchemical few. “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” we hear as “All You Need Is Love” begins to fade, the Beatles summoning the spectre of their younger selves from all of four years before. (It must have felt like four lifetimes.) And the lover and his lass who pass over the green cornfield, in the springtime of “As You Like It,” are recollected, deathlessly, in the flowing figure of Perdita, in “The Winter’s Tale”:
We have a word, in English, for self-plagiarizing so habitual, and so fruitfully evergreen, that it becomes the mark—the smack, if you will—by which an artist is recognized and loved. We call it style. ♦