> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 this to me in that it says erring is the norm. It would seem to me to be unusual that punishments might be appropriate.

> 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?

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

>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.

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.

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.

What if you don't grow intellectually and just slap together a PhD thesis that no one reads?

Then you've benefited nothing beyond the paper and the letters.

It's really the "cheat yourself" problem, except we put some value on that paper and those letters.

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.

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)

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

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).

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.

FYI, En effet = Indeed. Toutefois = However. I had to translate so I thought I'd share.

Rephrasing is worse than literal copying from a procedural point of view because it demonstrates intent and obviates a defense of mere incompetence.

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.

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.

It was a philosophy thesis, what's new in philosophy the past century

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.

I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts.

The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes.

Should they have used quotation marks? Technically, yes. But using them breaks up the flow for the reader, and it's not like they are failing to give credit to Einstein.

As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.

We need like an international plagiarism body to give you a stamp of approval when you write your dissertation so this doesn’t come back to bite you 20 years later.

A lot of times when I read certain plagiarism examples (Claudine Gay for instance)

Like plagiarism seems like it can happen for three reasons:

1. You intentionally tried to take someone else’s effort / ideas and make them your own. Real bad

2. You were lazy didn’t read enough to know to attribute correctly. Not great?

3. You were writing about a set of ideas that only have so many ways to express them. You really didn’t know.

I’m not saying we should give plagiarism a pass but maybe a statute of limitations? It seems really hard to tell 20 years later. Because to a certain extent - is this a case of 1? Did he pass of effort as his own? Or, if he has attributed Camus would you say “fair ‘nough mate, wasn’t central to your innovation”

Maybe we need to assess every paper ever written and figure out which percentage can be accused of plagiarism. Intuitively it seems like the number would be high.

This is rather reminiscent of the Bogdanov affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair

They had no impact / influence on COVID skeptic debates in France though

The university should suffer consequences as well since their thesis committee completely failed to do their job, especially those who didn't even notice they were the people whose work was being plagiarized. Since it's been demonstrated that you can successfully copy/paste your way to a PhD at this university this calls into question the validity of every other PhD obtained there.

Given the advent of LLMs, I don't know if plagiarism is ever a thing anymore. Nobody is stupid enough to include verbatim unless citing those works. Feed into an LLM to get a paraphrased version conveying the same meaning.

It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.

Plagiarism was always a stupidity/laziness charge though. People too lazy to reword the thing they’re copying and too dumb to realize they’d get caught.

If anything, the charge has even more gravity now since now you were too lazy to use an LLM. Kinda like when you see bad English in an Amazon product listing and wonder if you even want to buy from a company who was too lazy to use a free LLM to fix up the copy.

If the ecosystem required copy and paste to discover copied ideas, then it was doomed long ago and it’s a good thing that the AI era finally forces real process change.

It reads like those nightmares where you need to pass final exams again.

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.

Its the same guy who tweeted a photo of a pepperoni claiming it to be a star

Knowing the political ideas of some journalists from "Arrêt sur Images", I would like that they also criticize other people than someone named "Klein".

It is more frequent than you think. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14614

It's literally the norm.

That's wild I didn't expected the plagiarism to be that blatant. Extra shocked as a French who enjoyed listening to many of his talks

¡Borges!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

“You may note however that the university has not issued any statement refuting the information reported in the press.”

More blood will be spilled of unsuspecting academics before the credulity of the science industrial complex can be restored.

Too bad Harvard doesn’t have similarly high standards.

The problem is that Claudine Gay was not sacked, she was allowed to resign as president and is still, at this moment, a professor at Harvard. Here is her faculty web page:

https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/claudine-gay

So Harvard employs, as a full professor, someone whose Ph.D. thesis contained loads of plagiarism (I’ve seen the evidence, it’s not contestable). A similar offense on the part of the students who sit in her classroom, according to Harvard’s own rules, could lead to expulsion.

EDIT: Also, as pointed out in a comment below, Prof. Gay’s Ph.D. is from Harvard. It was not revoked.

> Recently a Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sacked.

But Gay's PhD was not revoked.

>clearly gives a strong impression of cronyism

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

The French since Derrida won't produce anything better than academic postmodernist nonsense slop but without needing the outputs from LLM degradation. OTOH, the VLC and FFMPEG/Qemu creators should be put first as the good examples on being a good French STEM people instead of the 99% of bullshitters at TF1 debating nonsense which IMHO they became largely irrelevant since Francis Bacon and Pascal. These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits about them and that's the recipe for disasters such as Sokal.

France is bacon but Francis is english

   These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits

Correct. French people are universalist, egalitarian, utopian, theory building lover, often refusing facing reality, however those traits are exactly what helped them build among the best products and theories in STEM

It’s like this everywhere all at once. The bullshitters have won at natural selection.

Literally, but of course when there is a news about it, suddenly it's "surprising", it's like when people find out about the Olympic games that their favorite athlete is leveraging steroids, hormones, drugs and so-on and act surprised (sure, even a 16-year old at the gym is using steroids but the one that is "at the top" doesn't? Absurdity), it's tiring to see, obviously virtually everyone is using PEDs there, the same way as virtually every student cheat to an extent.

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?

1. The committee that examined his work in depth didn't reach the same conclusion as you

2. If you need to use the exact same phrase as someone else, then you should cite them

He doesn't have a PhD in physics but in philosophy of Sciences. So he didn't plagiarize physics but philosophy.