The idiosyncrasies Jason Arday's tragic case surfaced

I originally posted the below as an article on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/taking-credit-someone-elses-creations-academics-vs-ai-zheng-phd-djj6e/

The recent death of Cambridge University's youngest black academic, Jason Arday, is unquestionably tragic. I felt confused, however, what to believe. 

Frankly, I was not aware of Arday's case until UCL's provost formally acknowledged support last week for colleagues who were affected by the situation. I had not been exposed to any of the media outlets accusing Arday of being a con artist. 

But as someone from a minority background in academia myself, I do not think it would be right to say nothing about this incident, if only to ask some genuine questions. 

So, here it goes.

Plagiarism is bad. Academics are normally taught to publish research ideas and findings with proper references to others that informed their work. It turns out, however, that prominent academics, both white and non-white, have plagiarised work. 

For example, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lawrence Tribe, and Claudine Gay are three (former) Harvard professors who had citations and quotation marks added to published books and articles after being accused of plagiarism. 

At least in the days without widely available AI tools to help people write, it may have been more plausible to plagiarise due to oversight in the writing process. That is, when you find a great explanation of an idea from someone else, you may copy-paste that into your own text editor with the intention to paraphrase it, or use it as a quote. 

Let us assume that Arday did plagiarise and embellish his life story. Notwithstanding the obvious condemnation of such malpractices, it is highly likely that many more academics have intentionally or unintentionally plagiarised some work. They will just never see the shadow that mass media outlets can cast on an individual, since they may not have risen to the same special status that Arday's role as "the youngest black professor" at Cambridge University represented. 

That is to say, if the people who questioned Arday's credibility as a scholar truly cared so much about fighting plagiarism, would those same people have done so for other academics, regardless of their background? 

For instance, given Cofnas' own ousting from Cambridge University following EDI-related controversy, it is possible that his Substack post a month ago that set off the public uproar on Arday was in part motivated by personal grudge. It would, however, not take away from the implication that Cambridge University could improve its due diligence - unless they knew about the suspicions and hired Arday nonetheless, which would make for an even more tragic case. 

Now enter AI. 

There have been major lawsuits against tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic about them scraping creatives' works and storing pirated publications. Although many of them are still ongoing, one could argue that the damage is already done. 

Countless texts and imagery are generated every day with AI, arguably infringing on the copyrights of books, songs, journalism, and artworks - every single time. 

In other words, aren't all of us who use generative AI "plagiarising" to some extent too? Rather than copy-pasting sentences to paraphrase later, we just let AI write for us. We would not even know to what extent these outputs resemble the original sources it "learned" from since we cannot always verify where the AI got its sentence structures from in the first place!

Interestingly, there are also industries where stealing ideas from others is not regulated against: fashion and beauty. Under the guise of "inspired by", have you ever noticed that selling cheap ("duped") clothes and cosmetics with the same or highly similar designs and intentions as those of other brands are legitimate? The infamous tension between Charlotte Tilbury and e.l.f. cosmetics is a great example of this. Or, look at imitated products sold on Shein. 

In these contexts, "plagiarism" is deemed practically difficult to prove, or too expensive to fight for designers of smaller businesses. 

All in all, even if Arday was rightfully accused of plagiarism and presenting alternative facts about his life, the way he was portrayed on covers of various media outlets before further formal independent investigations seems to have been disproportionate, precisely because of his skin tone. 

But there is also a bigger discussion to be had about how we value authenticity in this age of AI and highly saturated markets. 

May Jason rest in peace and his family and loved ones stay strong.