Plagiarism, Copyright, and AI

Critics of generative AI often describe it as a “plagiarism machine.” They may be right, though not in the sense they mean. With rare exceptions, generative AI doesn’t just copy someone else’s creative expression, producing outputs that infringe copyright. But it does get its ideas from somewhere. And it’s quite bad at identifying the source of those ideas. That means that students (and professors, and lawyers, and journalists) who use AI to produce their work generally aren’t engaged in copyright infringement. But they are often passing someone else’s work off as their own, whether or not they know it. While plagiarism is a problem in academic work generally, AI makes it much worse, because authors who use AI may be taking the ideas and words of someone else without knowing it.

Disclosing that the authors used AI isn’t a sufficient solution to the problem, because the people whose ideas are being used don’t get credit for those ideas. Whether or not a declaration that “AI came up with my ideas” is plagiarism, it is a bad academic practice.

We argue that AI plagiarism isn’t—and shouldn’t be—illegal. But it is still a problem in many contexts, particularly academic work, where proper credit is an essential part of the ecosystem. We suggest best practices to align academic and other writing with good scholarly norms in the AI environment.