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When teachers warned against plagiarism in school, they made it seem like the reason it was bad was because it got you out of doing work. Plagiarism was bad because it was lazy. And that is (1) not a very strong deterrent to students who are only taking this class and writing this paper because they’re forced to and therefore don’t care about the work, and (2) missing the real harm behind the action.

On some level, yeah, plagiarism is bad because it will prevent you from learning how to write well on your own. There’s a real fear that a generation of kids won’t know how to write (which means they won’t know how to think) because they’ll be so used to having an “AI” machine do it for them that they’ll be helpless without it. That is very much a concern. But it’s far from the only issue. Harry laid out the other problems really well:

1. Plagiarism is enshittification. When you have to reword stuff to hide that you’re stealing it, the writing will be clunkier, wordier, more awkward, and less natural-sounding. This makes the piece worse, which isn’t good for anyone. Who needs more bad writing in the world?

2. Plagiarism spreads misinformation. Again, stealing stuff usually requires having to reword things to get around plagiarism checkers. That can make it very easy to (accidentally or purposely) rewrite a sentence to now be false instead of true. This is made worse by the fact that hiding the source of the information makes fact-checking impossible.

3. Plagiarism is anti-educational. If the audience doesn’t know where something came from, they can’t go visit that source to learn more about the topic. They’re prevented from finding any additional knowledge, which makes research—and therefore progress—difficult.

4. Plagiarism makes it impossible for creators to earn a living, thereby making it impossible to create. Funnily enough, this means less material for plagiarists to steal from, so the whole scam is really just a snake eating its own tail. Like all scams, it can’t last long. When plagiarists can make huge profits by stealing and putting out content faster because they’re stealing, the real creators who actually do the work have no chance. They can’t compete because they can’t create as fast as a plagiarist can steal. So they don’t make as much money, which means they can’t live off their work, which in turn means they can’t create anymore. This keeps going until all that’s left is stolen garbage.

So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.

So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.

This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.