Aurornis
3 hours ago
> found instances of plagiarism on 20% of its pages, Guémart says, with fragments copied from intellectuals including author Albert Camus, physicist Louis de Broglie, and even some members of his thesis committee.
Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move.
I can't read enough French to understand every detail, but the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim: https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly.
At the same time, it's no longer necessary to pick sentences from other people's work and change the phrasing. You can take someone else's paper, feed it into an LLM, and tell it to rewrite it for you. Easier than ever before to launder text.
lukan
4 minutes ago
Is it confirmed, that it was intentional?
That is his defence:
"Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said."
I have never published anything in academic context, but I did write a lot and I often found that phrases of the same topic I read before creep into my own writing, so I could see this happening to me without intention.
On the other hand, this is in fact the standard defence when someone is accused of plagiarism. But sometimes it might actually be correct? (No idea here, my french ain't good enough either)
In general the reaction seems out of proportion to me, I much rather would like to have focus on actual fraud in science.
I sometimes read this blog for example and there seem to be other things going on with less attention.
bambax
3 hours ago
> Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move.
Fun fact: he's using this to prove he didn't do anything wrong, as in "see? the people on my thesis committee didn't care I copied their own work, why should anyone else?"
The truth is, people on "thesis committee" don't read thesis. Some do. The director usually does, if he has the time. But many don't; they glance at the intro and conclusion and call it a day.
> He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly
He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich. If you murdered someone before DNA testing was available, that doesn't exonerate you in any way.
jtbayly
2 hours ago
A lot of "plagiarism" is not plagiarism. Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from.
I don't know about this case, but a lot of these kinds of cases truly are witch-hunts. It's not at all like the reproducibility crisis and faked data and images.
contubernio
an hour ago
The very few cases that result in sanctions are generally horrendously flagrant.
With another professor I caught a flagrant case in a student thesis and we faced attacks from the university administration because the student had a stellar transcript (also not the positive signal some might think). Punishment was almost inexistent.
It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
goodluckchuck
an hour ago
Different leadership.
If some in your experience erred on the side of leniency, then it stands to reason that others might err just as egregiously in the opposite direction.
In fact, your anecdote suggests erring is the norm. We should thus expect punishments to be inappropriate in one direction or another. An appropriate punishment seems rather unlikely.
breezybottom
10 minutes ago
No, that doesn't stand to reason at all.
Aurornis
31 minutes ago
> I don't know about this case,
They compiled a document with the source material side-by-side https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
This goes well beyond accidentally triggering a plagiarism detector.
> Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from.
The examples in the article use very distinctive wording. One or two occurrences would be forgivable as coincidence or inspiration. An entire document full of examples points to something else.
nsagent
8 minutes ago
Having seen plagiarism first hand, sometimes it exceedingly blatant. Like copying from a PDF that was produced via LaTeX — since LaTeX hyphenates words to split them across lines, if you end up keep-ing the hyphenation in, the te-xt reads like this.
mysterydip
13 minutes ago
“Creepy old man says police should release him on account of Scooby Doo not existing at the time he decided to dress up as a ghost”
colechristensen
2 hours ago
Academia is very broken if even your thesis committee is A) not interested in reading your thesis and B) can't even be bothered to when it is ostensibly their job.
What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?
gus_massa
2 hours ago
Most PhD have a few papers before finishing the dissertation. Many times the dissertation is made of a few paper by the author glued together. The papers usually chain, so it's instead of
introduction1 -> main1 -> conclussion1
introduction2 -> main2 -> conclussion2
introduction3 -> main3 -> conclussion3
the thesis is something like
long introduction -> easy example -> main1 -> main2 -> main3 -> main of preprint -> long conclussion
AlotOfReading
2 hours ago
Thesis by publication is only one way, and not even the most common in many fields. I can't access the actual text of this thesis, but the abstract sounds more like a monograph and I don't see any author publications before the thesis that would lead me to think otherwise.
complex_pi
2 hours ago
Academia is very broken. That's it actually.
It's a long time that the incentive and job structure make universities a very toxic environment. Professors are basically running a 40 years race (about from bachelor or master graduation to retirement). It is still amazing that some good comes out of it.
rjzzleep
2 hours ago
It's very broken, and I'm not sure if it's possible to write everything original given that you're expected to repeat 2/3rds of past research to fill pages when you write your thesis. For a master thesis that was at least 100 pages. For a PhD nowadays each one of those is published as a book. At least it was like that in my engineering department.
cge
an hour ago
For both me (physics) and my wife (history), in the American system, both at strong universities, most of our committee members read most of of our dissertations. For her, in a field where thesis by publication is not standard (your thesis is typically revised into your first book), her committee at the defense focused on questions and comments based on the committee's reading of the thesis more than on the actual defense presentation, which is apparently also normal in the field. In part, I expect that's because the thesis is expected to be built into something important post-PhD, and comments are seen as helpful in that process.
For me, it wasn't quite so apparent at the defense, and I don't know that all members read the final thesis carefully, but most of them had already seen me publish or present most of the research previously, often multiple times. I also know that some (and not just my advisor) did read the final thesis very closely. My thesis was only partially thesis by publication, however, which may have influenced this; it does now have a fair number of citations in its own right, which is somewhat unusual for the theses in the field, and potentially seen as awkward (it means there's significant work in the thesis that I never published elsewhere).
As a caveat, the American system (before current crises) does feel like it can have a two-tier system of PhD students who are expected to remain in academia (we both were) and ones who are not, even at strong universities. Expectations, and attention given, can vary considerably. The American system also tends to have larger and more closely involved committees than, for example, the UK/Irish system.
However, for the form of plagiarism discussed here: if someone had sentences from papers I published years ago interspersed in their work, and they weren't particularly notable sentences, I'm not confident I would notice. Depending on citations and what the sentences were, I'm not even sure I'd mind much, for example, if they were essentially copying a model definition.
swatcoder
2 hours ago
Early work in any trade is mostly junk, and academia no exception.
But the process of creating that work, engaged throughought that process with those purported to be more practiced, is usually pretty good at seeding enough expertise and confidence that you might be able to proceed more independently and with real novelty, or might at least be prepared to share the trade with others new to it.
That's the point of those years, and so it's more than a little ironic that AI is being used to undermine a practicing expert while simultaneously eroding the traditional process for becoming one by making it so easy to just generate slop and engage with hallucinations than to actually practice writing deep work or engaging with primary sources.
colechristensen
2 hours ago
The whole idea of a PhD is acknowledging that a person has made a meaningful contribution.
It is not "early work" but the end of early work. The masterpiece: the piece of work that proves a subject has mastered their craft.
If you're still producing junk you haven't earned your PhD.
jltsiren
44 minutes ago
I guess I disagree with both of you.
You probably have plenty of novel ideas in early career, but you almost certainly lack the experience and the basic understanding of your field to develop them properly. Most people have exhausted their own ideas by mid-career. But that that point, they should have the skills and the experience to work on the ideas they come across.
(Looking back at my PhD, it's quite amusing how little did I understand. On the other hand, many of the choices I intuitively made turned out to have some value. But in some cases, understanding that properly took a decade of work by other people.)
Your PhD work is an apprenticeship, after which you are expected to work as a journeyman. The masterpiece that qualifies you for independent work as a tenured professor is often called habilitation. Many academic cultures don't have those, because the expectations are so situational that they don't want to formalize them.
breezybottom
9 minutes ago
Well that's the ideal yes, but it's not the reality.
vjk800
an hour ago
That's how it was maybe 100 years ago. Now PhD is just another bit of school work. Sometimes people manage to do really great PhD work, but most of the time it's pretty mediocre or straight garbage.
In some ways, people doing research now have it way more difficult than people of the past. They have hundreds of years worth of research to study before they are on top of things and making an original contribution that stands out among the huge amount of research that already exists is really hard. If we want to keep PhD as a proof of meaningful work, then we ought to lengthen the graduate studies considerably. How about a 10 year PhD program, at the end of which you can really say you have mastered the field?
foldr
2 hours ago
That’s how people outside academia see PhDs. Inside academia, everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much. It can take decades to really become an expert in a field, and a PhD program usually lasts around 5 years (in the US).
colechristensen
2 hours ago
>everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much
Then academia is broken and the universities that operate like this should be dismantled (not to mention the accreditation organizations)
What's actually happening is people chasing items on a CV instead of actual knowledge is rotting the core of universities.
wholinator2
40 minutes ago
I believe the person was saying that in academia, literally everyone has a PhD, by definition since it's a requirement for the job, so the simple act of having it means nothing in the context of all of the other people that have it. It of course means a great deal since it's what let's you in to the room in the first place. Imagine interviewing 50 people, every single one of whom have an internship on their resume. What they did during their internship matters of course, but the simple act of having had one doesn't differentiate (matter).
I find it rich how fast you are to jump to destroying the entirety of academia in one stroke. It's quite easy to say things we don't understand should not exist, of course I'm guilty of this myself from time to time. Have you done education beyond the bachelor's degree? It's a very different world.
foldr
an hour ago
Who does or doesn't have a PhD isn't terribly important in the scheme of things. Inside academia, the job market is highly competitive, and no-one is getting a job just on the strength of a cookie-cutter PhD thesis. Outside academia, it mostly makes no difference to anything whether you have a PhD or not.
If we apply your criteria, I'm not sure if any universities would be left.
Calavar
2 hours ago
The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.
There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.
foldr
2 hours ago
It varies a lot by field, but in many (not all) scientific fields, a PhD thesis is largely a formality these days. Your publication record is what counts. The days where you could get a tenure track faculty position just on the strength of a PhD thesis are long gone.
wbl
an hour ago
Depends on the subfields. CS is by publication, number theory varies ("my students can find a stapler" to the dissertation has revolutionary result not published elsewhere)
a-dub
2 hours ago
that's how i understand it. it's a portfolio with front matter, back matter, the papers that got published with some connective tissue between them and maybe some discussion of the things that didn't work out and why.
psychoslave
2 hours ago
Reproducing elitist social structure?
thaumasiotes
an hour ago
> He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich.
What crime?
andy99
3 hours ago
Personally I think writing with an LLM is at least as bad as stitching together phrases from others.
The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means. Even if it fits the letter of the definition, on a phd thesis that may or may not be a big deal. If he’s passing off the ideas of others as his, or faking his research by using the results of others or making them up, then that’s really bad. If he’s just using phrases / wording from others to get his original points across, it looks bad but I don’t see it as a huge deal, especially 30 years out from the phd.
A PhD is supposed to be original research, if the originality or integrity is in question that’s one thing, the rest is much more pedantic, even if technically wrong.
Aurornis
3 hours ago
> The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means.
They link to the document that shows the plagiarized sections side by side with their sources
https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
I don't read enough French (especially at PhD thesis level!) to parse everything, but even I can see phrasings copied from the source documents in a lot of the examples. Some of them weren't even paraphrasing, they were lifting the exact distinctive word choices.
bambax
2 hours ago
He has a lot of wild defense arguments; one of my favorites is: at some point in his life he lost the ability to speak; to recover his voice he trained it by reading aloud some books over and over, so much so that the content of these books became part of his own brain / of himself.
(Another one, unrelated, but also wild, argues that people who attack him are in fact against science itself, that they want to go back to the Middle Ages, etc.)
It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters!
xtracto
2 hours ago
I don't understand who would plagiarize for their PhD thesis. In a PhD thesis one of the main things you want is to "blame it" on others so that you don't have to "justify" the text. The more references you have, the better, and the less questioning you have (those are peer reviewed published references after all).
dmbche
2 hours ago
No no he was copy pasting! In the Arret sur image article you can read a whole sentences plagiarized where the author just changed "En effet" to "Toutefois" (for example) at the begining of the quote.
dmfdmf
an hour ago
FYI, En effet = Indeed. Toutefois = However. I had to translate so I thought I'd share.
thinking_cactus
18 minutes ago
Honestly, (not knowing about this case specifics) I don't think even copying Camus or de Broglie passages (not an entire text of course) is much of a problem to be honest. At one point some things become more or less common sense or public domain. I think this would be rather than plagiarism "citation misbehavior" -- i.e. failing to cite or mention previous work. Like, not every math geometry paper needs to cite Euclid, you can just talk about triangles; or even copying passages from say the parallel postulate or whatnot, when actually delivering something novel, should not count as fraud or plagiarism, simply failing to cite a historical source, in my opinion.
Also, I believe citation is usually limited to prior written work. I don't think citing personal communications is mandatory, but at least for me lots of ideas come up in personal communications, random discussions, etc.. I think actually we should give more credit in this case, but it shows that attributing fraud for failing to cite may be a little too harsh. Again, I don't know if that's the case here, or if his thesis is just some pastiche or prior work without any significant or original contribution.
contubernio
an hour ago
Rephrasing is worse than literal copying from a procedural point of view because it demonstrates intent and obviates a defense of mere incompetence.
crdrost
16 minutes ago
It's worth pointing out that his M.O. was apparently to sometimes tweak the beginning of a sentence and then word-for-word copy some chunk from this source, some from that source, maybe tweak the ending to create a lead-in to the following sentence... but this is not just "oh some figures of speech lodged in my subconscious" -- this is like "whole sentences were mashed up together."
Just some Google Translate of some of the plagiarized paragraphs, the thesis "The Unity of Physics" has:
> The idea that the diversity of reality is underpinned by a deeper unity is as old as thought itself. Great mythologies recount it, early philosophers affirm it, and modern science has taken up the same agenda by first unifying concepts of motion, matter, and space. Indeed, the desire for intelligibility can arguably not do without the idea of the One. However, simply attributing such a tendency to human nature does not validate its realizations. The proclaimed unity may well prove false—stemming merely from incantation, decree, or fantasy—while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. Yet, if thought were to discover—amidst the shifting mirrors of phenomena—eternal relationships capable of encapsulating them, one could certainly speak of a joy of the mind. While not necessarily an essential framework of thought, the desire for unity corresponds to a nostalgia, a craving for the absolute, an ontological impatience. Yet, the moment it is expressed, it clashes with the irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world. At the close of the century, the increasingly assertive power of physical theories—with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—prompts us to examine the foundations of the physicists' quest for unity, to define its limits, and to consider its current prospects.
This is claimed to be a mashup of paragraphs from three different sources, first, the sentence starting "However..." is said to hail from Jean-Michel Besnier's "Theories of Knowledge",
> Could the "monist" tendency inherent in the act of knowing be suggested any more clearly? Yet, simply positing such a tendency within human nature is obviously not enough to validate its realizations. Indeed, that unity may well prove illusory, stemming from sheer fantasy while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. That is precisely why critical philosophy sets out to distinguish between the scientific and...
Followed by a bit of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus,"
> If man were to recognize that the universe, too, can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought were to discover, within the shifting mirrors of phenomena, eternal relationships capable of summarizing them—and of summarizing themselves in a single principle—one could speak of a happiness of the spirit of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ludicrous counterfeit. This longing for unity, this craving for the absolute, illustrates the essential movement of the human drama. Yet the fact that this longing exists does not imply that it must be immediately appeased.
The last sentence of Sisyphus was changed except for the "Yet" to what appeared to be an original sentence or two in the thesis, "Yet ... irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world" -- but only to immediately jump into a third line from Parrochia's "Grand Revolutions of the 20th Century,"
> The increasingly assertive power of modern physical theories—along with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—now enables the scientist to occupy, to some extent, the role held by the philosopher from antiquity through the classical age. This is by no means the least significant consequence of the revolution we have experienced...
My very very initial read of this style, I would almost guess that he paid someone else -- someone who did not have a science education -- to write his thesis for him. And probably if that were true, then he had to provide the sources, "I like this sentence from here, that one from there, you see I highlighted this paragraph of this paper -- I'll highlight and you just paste everything together into one big whole and I'll look through the word processor and tweak a couple of sentence beginnings and endings to make everything look nice for the committee and probably only one person on the committee really reads a bit of it but let's be honest that they're all busy with their own research." With that sort of origin, that's how you get the "blind copying without rephrasing" type of thing (The person who's copying doesn't trust their technical chops to rephrase anything! "What if I choose the wrong word and it has another meaning in science and I embarrass myself?" -- so they go verbatim, "this made sense to someone who was well educated in the sciences, it can't be too embarrassing") with a little bit of tweaks between the chunks.
The really incredible thing about the plagiarism report is the 16 copié-collé/copy-paste sections AFTER this one, where it's just like "Yep, he stole whole pages at a time from his sources in just this way."
seydor
3 hours ago
It was a philosophy thesis, what's new in philosophy the past century
jltsiren
16 minutes ago
Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), A Theory of Justice (Rawls), and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) have all been pretty influential.
csh0
2 hours ago
foldr
an hour ago
If anything from 1926 onwards is fair game, then tons of work in the foundations of mathematics. And if you're willing to be slightly more more generous with your time-frame: Russel's paradox.
nradov
an hour ago
Hopefully someone will eventually run plagiarism detection tools on every single doctoral and master's degree thesis ever submitted at every university worldwide. We need to make an example of those who committed academic fraud by ruining their careers.
Glyptodon
an hour ago
TBH this sounds harder to parse than I expected as there are various situations where rephrasing things is acceptable. I think historically allusion and rephrase, particularly of common and well known things, without citation I think was much more common, but now academics often err in the direction of finding citations for the sky being blue or water wet. And I do trust that it very much went beyond the pale given the university revoking a degree.