Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has announced plans to implement artificial intelligence (AI) technology to conduct plagiarism reviews of leaders and faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other prestigious institutions. In a recent statement on social media platform X, Ackman emphasized the potential impact of AI on academic integrity.
According to Ackman, the AI-powered plagiarism reviews will target all current MIT faculty, President Sally Kornbluth, members of MIT's administration, and its board. He explained, "Every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others."
Acknowledging the paradox that AI itself is built on the work of others, Ackman believes institutions of higher learning will need to update their plagiarism standards due to the evolving role of AI. He expressed interest in the establishment of AI startups to handle such reviews independently.
Furthermore, Ackman called for similar AI-powered probes at other elite universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Penn, and Dartmouth. He argued that these schools should either validate plagiarism accusations or risk having others do it for them. Ackman suggested, "Perhaps more importantly, the donors are going to demand that the review is done by an independent third party."
In addressing potential responses to AI-identified plagiarism, Ackman differentiated between cases resulting from the "laziness of the author" and more intentional instances where "important ideas are intentionally stolen without attribution."
In a related development, it was reported that Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor, faced accusations of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation. Oxman admitted to omitting quotation marks, apologized, and committed to verifying citations for necessary corrections.
Despite the allegations against Oxman, Ackman defended her, stating that the use of definitions from Wikipedia without citation might not constitute plagiarism, raising the need for a broader discussion on the topic.
The MIT Corporation, MIT's board of trustees, responded to Ackman's plagiarism probe, stating, "Our leaders remain focused on ensuring the vital work of the people of MIT continues."
Ackman's call for AI-powered plagiarism reviews reflects a growing emphasis on leveraging technology to uphold academic integrity, prompting discussions about the evolving standards within higher education.
