American hedge fund tycoon Bill Ackman continued to post over the weekend to defend his wife, who was recently exposed to plagiarism in her paper. He believed that if the failure to properly indicate the sources of all cited materials in the paper is defined as plagiarism, then no one's paper can withstand the inspection of artificial intelligence tools.
“No scholarly work will survive the power of AI searching for missing quotes, inappropriate paraphrasing, and/or failure to properly credit the work of others,” the Pershing Square Capital Management founder and CEO wrote.
In another earlier post by Ackerman, he vowed to examine papers by MIT President Sally Kornbluth and faculty to see if they had also committed plagiarism, writing: "We will share our findings in the public domain."
Following that post, he wrote in a Sunday post, "I'm sure the collective gasp can be heard across campus. Why? Every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be exposed."
Ekman also wrote that from now on, no paper written by faculty will be published “without a careful AI plagiarism review.” "But papers written before today will inevitably fail the AI plagiarism test. What should we do? I think the answer is that there are different kinds of plagiarism, and it depends on the situation."
He continued, "What if plagiarism reviews turned into an embarrassment for the entire university? That could lead to swaths of faculty being fired. Donors terminating donations. Federal funds being withdrawn, faculty and universities suing each other over what was plagiarized and what wasn't, a massive litigation firestorm."
He added that "maybe that's a good thing" given the impact higher education has on society.
Ackerman previously launched a pressure campaign targeting the presidents of three U.S. universities - MIT's Kornbluth, Harvard's Claudine Gay and the University of Pennsylvania's Liz McGill - after they failed to demonstrate during congressional hearings in December that they would stand up to anti-Semitism on their campuses. McGill resigned shortly after the hearing, and Gay announced his resignation last Tuesday. Now Ackerman is focusing on Kornbluth.
Ackerman noted that plagiarism was not on his mind when he pushed to oust Gay from Harvard, despite later playing a key role in the plagiarism charges against her.
“I did not initially ask for Claudine Gay’s removal as Harvard president because of the plagiarism accusations,” he wrote. “In fact, from the beginning, I simply wanted to help her address the rise of anti-Semitism on campus.”