How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really?

What I find charming about the humanizers is how human they are—that is, with what cheerful candor they proceed on the assumption that, as fallen beings, we have no option but to cheat. Not only can we not think for ourselves, or write by ourselves; we really can’t help ourselves, either, so here comes technology to spare us the pain. As for the notion that we might forgo A.

I. in the first place, relying instead on our own wits, and that such self-sufficiency might even be good for us, forget it. That’s like suggesting we learn to ride a penny-farthing, inhaling the sweet scents of the hedgerows as we pedal along. One of the knottiest problems in this vexing new field of endeavor concerns the relationship between A.

I. and plagiarism. It could be argued that the two are nearly identical, given that artificial intelligence scrapes up immeasurably vast amounts of online data, like those trawlers that scour the seabed for shrimp and flatfish with weighted nets, and to hell with the natural habitat. A chatbot is not (or not yet) an individual, and therefore bears no moral responsibility, but to lay hold of what it delivers, and to pass it off as one’s own work, could be construed as handling stolen goods.

That, at any rate, is a viewpoint that prevails at some of the sturdier colleges in the United States. The most robust that I have come across is San José State University, where the advice offered by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library is admirably clear: “It doesn’t matter which AI program/software you use. Using any of these to write your papers is considered a form of plagiarism.”

What plagiarism is and has been, and what it may be in the process of becoming, are questions addressed by Roger Kreuz in a bouncy new book titled “Strikingly Similar” (Cambridge). He defines plagiarism as “the deliberate appropriation of someone else’s words and ideas without acknowledgement or compensation.” Words and ideas?

That’s quite a bundle. Also, as Kreuz rightly asks, how many words? Or, indeed, how many musical notes?

He offers a peculiar example: when the Chiffons sang three notes, in a simple descent, at the start of their 1963 hit “He’s So Fine,” written by Ronnie Mack, few listeners foresaw that the sequence would form the nub of a legal dispute that would, absurdly, not be concluded until 1998. The issue was whether, when George Harrison sang the words “My sweet Lord,” in the 1970 song of that title, he was recalling, borrowing, swiping, unwittingly echoing, or accidentally mimicking Mack’s melodic phrase. The fact that the two songs were atmospherically far apart—the ex-Beatle robed his harmonies with a chant of “Hare Krishna”—was beside the point.

To the victim, a transcendental thief is still a thief. What kind of victim are you, though, when somebody summons the nerve to plagiarize you? You are physically intact.

You haven’t lost a wallet, a diamond necklace, or a child. There could be a dent in your artistic pride, but it’s unlikely to hurt as much as a stubbed toe. Privately, you might even feel a trifle smug—flattered that your stuff should merit larceny.

Maybe that is why neither Harrison nor any other Beatle was moved to protest when the spiky and urgent bass riff that introduces “Taxman,” on “Revolver,” appeared more or less intact at the start of “Start!,” the fifth track on “Sound Affects,” a 1980 album by the Jam.

According to Bruce Foxton, the Jam’s bassist, “it wasn’t intentional, but ‘Taxman’ subconsciously went in.” As it happens, Foxton’s explanation comes uncannily close to the 1976 ruling of a New York judge, Richard Owen, who asserted that, although Harrison’s use of “He’s So Fine” had not been deliberate, “his subconscious knew it already.” Spooky.

It’s hardly news that the subconscious can exact a heavy cost, though even Freud would have raised an eyebrow at the amount—more than two million dollars—that Owen ordered Harrison to pay. (The amount was later reduced, but that was not, by a long stretch, the end of the affair.) So, given the resemblance, why weren’t the Jam in a pickle? Well, the Beatles didn’t need the money, even after paying what they considered too much in taxes, and it could be that homage, blatant or otherwise, struck them as their rightful due.

Rare was the creative artist, post-1970, who wasn’t churned up by bobbing in the Beatles’ wake. Kreuz doesn’t mention the Jam in his book, but he does usher us through the Harrison case, arriving at a crux that will, God willing, never be neatly resolved: If the unconscious mind has no statute of limitations, then it becomes difficult to draw a bright line between appropriation on the one hand and inspiration on the other. Anybody who embarks on a study of plagiarism hoping for bright lines is in for a foggy shock.

Here is the land of blur. Only intermittently in “Strikingly Similar” does an act of plagiarism stand out as conscious, unambiguous, and proud. If the book has a hero, it is a great man named Alfred J. Carter, whom Kreuz describes as “an unemployed welder,” and who, in 1949, “was caught when he tried to sell a Wordsworth poem to Good Housekeeping.”

Which poem, and why did the killjoys at the magazine turn it down? Weren’t readers crying out for tips on how to make their daffodils golden and hostly? The more poetry that could be smuggled under their noses, by whatever means, the better their skill at keeping house.

Earth has not anything to show more fair than the crust on a chicken potpie. There is a rough story line that relates to plagiarism, which goes as follows. Plagiaristic mischief did not exist—or, at least, did not exert such a grip on the collective conscience—before the Romantic era, with its pesky insistence upon “originality.”

Before then, it was deemed not just defensible but natural that a person bent on creative deeds would proceed via imitation: you studied your models, learning to copy them and thus whetting the edge of your skill. Only then were you qualified to venture upon work of your own devising, which would, needless to say, continue to show evidence of its predecessors. Staid though it sounds, this process bequeathed to us, in bulk, an unmanageable wealth of beautiful objects.

At first glance, Raphael’s “Marriage of the Virgin,” from 1504, is pretty much a straight rehash of the same subject as painted in the preceding years by Perugino, to whom Raphael had been apprenticed. But a hundred glances, or more, are needed to calibrate what has changed: the way in which the presiding priest, mid-frame, cocks his head and animates the hitherto chilly symmetry of the composition; the elaborating of the temple behind him, with figures now filling two of its arches; and the tense spectacle of a suitor breaking a staff across his knee in frustration at being supplanted by Joseph. You find yourself bracing for the snap.

(In the earlier painting, he bends the staff feebly over his thigh.) Was Perugino, the master overtaken by his pupil, similarly tempted to smash something?