Tag: plagiarism

Harvard’s president Claudine Gay faces 40 new allegations of plagiarism: Latest claims refer to seven publications she’s written and include ‘entire paragraphs lifted from other sources’

Embattled Harvard president Claudine Gay has been hit with fresh allegations of plagiarism, with claims that she lifted ‘entire paragraphs’ in her academic writing – but the Ivy League says it’s still backing her. 

The new allegations were first published in a shocking report from the Washington Free Beacon and span seven publications authored by Gay over 30 years, ranging from missing quotation marks around a few phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs lifted verbatim. Gay is now accused of plagiarizing about half of the 11 journal articles on her resume.

The academic initially submitted two corrections to papers from 2001 and 2017 after she was accused of plagiarism, adding ‘quotation marks and citations,’ a Harvard spokesman said.  However, after additional claims of plagiarism, the Ivy League then said on Wednesday that Gay would also update three spots in her Ph.D. dissertation to add attributions.

It comes as the House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced that it’s widening the scope of it’ probe into Gay’s work, and demanded the school hand over all documentation related to the plagiarism allegations. The committee had already opened a probe into antisemitism at the Harvard campus following Gay’s testimony that was heavily criticized. 

‘Our concern is that standards are not being applied consistently, resulting in different rules for different members of the academic community,’ said Republican rep. Virginia Foxx, the committee’s chair.

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‘This is Definitely Plagiarism’: Harvard University President Claudine Gay Copied Entire Paragraphs From Others’ Academic Work and Claimed Them as Her Own

Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.”

Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.

In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their “decrease” to “increase” because she was studying a different set of data.

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CNET’s AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism

The prominent tech news site CNET‘s attempt to pass off AI-written work keeps getting worse. First, the site was caught quietly publishing the machine learning-generated stories in the first place. Then the AI-generated content was found to be riddled with factual errors. Now, CNET‘s AI also appears to have been a serial plagiarist — of actual humans’ work.

The site initially addressed widespread backlash to the bot-written articles by assuring readers that a human editor was carefully fact-checking them all prior to publication.

Afterward, though, Futurism found that a substantial number of errors had been slipping into the AI’s published work. CNET, a titan of tech journalism that sold for $1.8 billion back in 2008, responded by issuing a formidable correction and slapping a warning on all the bot’s prior work, alerting readers that the posts’ content was under factual review. Days later, its parent company Red Ventures announced in a series of internal meetings that it was temporarily pausing the AI-generated articles at CNET and various other properties including Bankrate, at least until the storm of negative press died down.

Now, a fresh development may make efforts to spin the program back up even more controversial for the embattled newsroom. In addition to those factual errors, a new Futurism investigation found extensive evidence that the CNET AI’s work has demonstrated deep structural and phrasing similarities to articles previously published elsewhere, without giving credit. In other words, it looks like the bot directly plagiarized the work of Red Ventures competitors, as well as human writers at Bankrate and even CNET itself.

Jeff Schatten, a professor at Washington and Lee University who has been examining the rise of AI-enabled misconduct, reviewed numerous examples of the bot’s apparent cribbing that we provided. He found that they “clearly” rose to the level of plagiarism.

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NBC News says 11 articles written by politics reporter contained plagiarism

NBC News has ousted a politics reporter after uncovering evidence of plagiarism in at least 11 of her articles.

NBC News disclosed the incident in a note to its readers on Monday, revealing it had determined the 11 articles in question “did not meet our standards for original material” and “contained passages from other news organizations that were used without attribution.”

The note to readers did not name the reporter. But a source within the outlet told The Post that the reporter was Teaganne Finn, who joined NBC News last June to cover politics after a stint at Bloomberg.

The source confirmed that Finn is no longer with NBC News, though it’s unclear if she was fired or resigned.

Finn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The source at NBC News said editors first noticed an unattributed passage in one article with Finn’s byline during what was described as a routine editing process. The outlet found more examples of plagiarism after a more thorough review.

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