Plagiarism, Theft, and Truth: Understanding Academic Integrity as a Way of Knowing

Abstract

Universities have historically used moral rhetoric to describe and discourage plagiarism involving human authors, specifically by comparing or defining plagiarism as a form of theft. However, some forms of contemporary plagiarism involve artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence alone, and the absence of interpersonal moral harms in such cases arguably poses a problem for historical descriptions and definitions of plagiarism. After summarizing arguments against historical definitions of plagiarism, I suggest that new forms of plagiarism also transcend these moral comparisons and definitions. Ultimately, I propose a non-moral model of academic integrity that can better support policy decisions and academic conversations about plagiarism, especially in response to the recent emergence of generative artificial intelligence in student writing.