#4 - Plagiarism and Fabrication

 

Plagiarism and fabrication are enormous issues that journalists must be aware of at all times and avoid at all costs. Plagiarism has personally overseen the fall of journalists and college students alike. Plagiarism did potentially be found in any medium in which an individual can duplicate someone else’s work while claiming the work to be original.  

Recently there has been huge development concerning artificial intelligence with some being capable of forming art while others can create highly professional sounding breakdowns analysis him and stories after being given a prompt. Please text based AI programs have become the center of some controversy now that it has been discovered that these programs often plagiarize to get their stunning results. 

Clarkesworld, a Sci-fi magazine that accepts user submissions in exchange for money has reportedly been flooded with hundreds of AI derived stories. Over 500 stories submitted to the magazine were flagged for plagiarism in the first 20 days of February. This was especially odd for the magazine as typically they would get around 30 or less submissions flagged for plagiarism within one month. Plagiarism has always been a massive issue that is potentially career ending whenever it is discovered in the media. With the rising use of artificial intelligence to develop professional writing it seems possible that as time goes on artificially written stories will become harder and harder to detect. 

The editor for Clarkesworld, Neil Clarke, as stated that he and his team have observed patterns in the AI generated stories but would not share what details gave away stories written artificially. He claimed his secrecy over these key giveaway details was to prevent the people submitting these stories from having an easier time getting away with artificially producing content while claiming it was original. He went on to state that this trend of artificially written stories being produced and sent to publishers in hopes of making money is being encouraged by TikTok trends of side hustles, in which easy money can be made with minimal effort.  

Additionally, artificially created products cannot be copyrighted as they were not created by the human hand, and the works produced by these AI systems are not developed with human originality. Repeatedly the U.S. Copyright Office ruled against attempts to copyright AI derived work as the work lacks human authorship. Although there is a lack of legislation regarding copyright laws pertaining to nonhumans, previous court rulings have set a precedent against granting copyrights to non-humans. 

The issues of plagiarism and fabrication have been ever present threats to facts and journalistic integrity for centuries. As time has passed, the technology behind these problems has advanced radically in a relatively brief time. The techniques plagiarists are utilizing are rapidly advancing and this problem is never likely to go away. With the development of exceedingly sophisticated methods of stealing content from others, it is imperative that tools and resources are continuously developed to combat the latest programs by catching all examples of plagiarism as well as determining what stories are not written by human hands.