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.

> 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.

Crediting the origin of the idea is the whole point of citing sources. Learning something from someone doesn't mean the idea is yours now. It means that when you repeat that idea, you should cite the original source of the idea.

This is just how scholarship works. It's not needed in the kind of day to day most of us do, but when you're writing a thesis for a PhD, this stuff matters. You're making the argument that you're expanding the totality of human knowledge with your dissertation, and that requires strict source citing to separate your original scholarship from the sources that influenced it.

What are these tools? I often write about stuff on my blog and I know a lot of what I’m writing or thinking about are ideas someone else has come up with (and that I’ve read but not remembered or not read and come up with a poor version of) but bog standard LLM DeepResearch never picks up the things I want.

I imagine any tool that’s good at plagiarism detection would also kill it at this kind of literature research.

An example of something where it worked like this is that I had some ideas around how tribes evolve and so on and wrote them as I could think of them and ChatGPT was able to find that Darwin’s Cathedral had a far better synthesis of various much more rigorous takes on the subject.

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.