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.
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.
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.
(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!
As much as ~60-70% of current academia leaders have bogus credentials and engage in plagiarism (from their colleagues, students, etc...).
It's just terrible, we live in a modern dark ages because of this.
Cheating in life isn't necessarily that bad, if you are at the end of your studies and it's either you pass by cheating, either you don't, then the only logical thing to do is to cheat, who would go in more debt and potentially ruin their live doing otherwise, and WHY?
So many things in physics have to be written in a very specific manner , to convey the meaning of the precise concepts being used. in such cases, it is a very common practice to copy the sentences used before, in order to ensure that everyone understands the meaning in a precise manner.
So then to call it plagiarism doesn't make any sense
2. If you need to use the exact same phrase as someone else, then you should cite them
God damn¹, Louis XIV’s country that inspired La société du spectacle to Guy Debord is actually a great place to make a career as a courtesan, who would have guess.
Guillotine images in streets are also on the rise: I can no longer make the smallest road trip without seeing some plastered all around.
Looks like neither the wanna shine as elite in the bonnes gens side nor the drive me to unsustainable pauperized state in the crowd can refrain from their extreme propensities.
¹ https://www.capmemo.fr/sciences-humaines/983-le-mariage-de-f...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
Never heard of him
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.
What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
adalacelove•1h ago
I guess nowadays it is much simpler to correlate some text with prior work, more so with LLMs. It is like those doping cases where several years later we are able to detect a previously unknown sustance in an old sample.