What I learned from checking my own writing
God is a fearful plagiarist. Don’t believe me? Read on. As a sideshow to the ongoing plagiarism wars — former Harvard University president Claudine Gay is accused of being a plagiarist! Neri Oxman, the wife of Gay’s tormenter, Bill Ackman, is reportedly a copycat! — I ran a batch of my recent work through a plagiarism checker.
I paid $30 to activate the Plagiarism Checker at Grammarly.com, which helpfully warns that “Plagiarism — even unintentional plagiarism — can have serious consequences.” Then I fed a halfdozen of my recent columns into the portal. Ho hum. My highest plagiarism score was 7 percent, with the website suggesting that I lifted that portion of a column about stupid “smart” gizmos from a piece I had never read published by a website (dawn.com) I had never heard of.
My lowest plagiarism score was a flat zero for a piece I wrote about former fugitive Katherine Ann Power.
Because Grammarly also provides artificial intelligence-generated “writing suggestions,” the program told me to “replace the word gizmo” in the column about gizmos. It also told me to “correct your spelling” of the word “vibecession,” in a column poking fun at the term vibecession. It proposed substituting “vibe session,” which really puts the artificial back into artificial intelligence.
Over at The Atlantic, writer Ian Bogost had an equally underwhelming experience with a different plagiarism detector called iThenticate. That program informed him that 74 percent of his 68,000-word dissertation, finished in 2004, was plagiarized. This proved to be nonsense. Because Bogost later wrote a book based on his dissertation, “the software suggested that I’d plagiarized my dissertation from a future version of myself.”
As an expert explained to Bogost, the plagiarism checker doesn’t actually detect plagiarism; it sniffs out copied or similar text on the internet. After sorting through the multiple false positives assigned to his work, Bogost wrote, “My dissertation’s fraud factor had dropped from 74 percent to zero.”
As part of his vendetta against MIT, which he believes may have abetted the attack on his wife’s reputation, investor Ackman announced on X that he plans to review “the work of all current MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism.”
Based on the experiences described above, this venture seems likely to throw off much heat, zero light.
Having emerged from the maw of Plagiarism Central more or less unscathed, I found some other texts to feed into the Plagiarism Checker meat grinder. Bill Belichick’s farewell remarks at his Thursday press conference scored zero copying; he’s an original guy.
A recent Peggy Noonan column in The Wall Street Journal, which contained a four-paragraph long quote from Fareed Zakaria (who was once suspended for plagiarism), had negligible copying concerns, because all of Zakaria’s remarks were properly couched in quotation marks.
Venturing further afield, I inserted the famous opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” into the checker. (I had just heard Neil Gaiman praising the work on Paul Giamatti’s podcast with Stephen Asma, “Chinwag.”) Grammarly predictably assailed Dickens’s spelling — “Correct your spelling – coffin-nail” — then asserted that the excerpt was 45 percent plagiarized. From other digitized versions of the story on the internet, of course.
How would God fare in the plagiarism sweepstakes, I wondered? God’s longest recorded remarks comprise four chapters of the Book of Job, Chapters 38-41, which begin, “Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind.” It is a remarkable speech and a stinging rebuke to Job’s complaints about his sorry lot. Who are you to complain? God answers in a famous diatribe: “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear [the constellation Ursa Major] with its cubs?”
Grammarly’s Plagiarism Checker assigned God — God! — a full copycat score of 100 percent, because it seems that 80 percent of the text can be found in a PhD thesis registered at GardnerWebb University in 2014, and the remaining 20 percent was quoted in a master’s thesis awarded by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, “The Potential of Combining Christian Faith and Nature Conservation.”
We are all plagiarists now.
It proposed substituting “vibe session,” which really puts the artificial back into artificial intelligence.