I don't know about this case, but a lot of these kinds of cases truly are witch-hunts. It's not at all like the reproducibility crisis and faked data and images.
With another professor I caught a flagrant case in a student thesis and we faced attacks from the university administration because the student had a stellar transcript (also not the positive signal some might think). Punishment was almost inexistent.
It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
If some in your experience erred on the side of leniency, then it stands to reason that others might err just as egregiously in the opposite direction.
In fact, your anecdote suggests erring is the norm. We should thus expect punishments to be inappropriate in one direction or another. An appropriate punishment seems rather unlikely.
Universities and other similar large institutions usually err systematically in one direction - that which protects the institution.
Personal grudges. Academia is full of them.
No respect for the plagiarist physicist, but an easy way to control what media representatives of scientific disciplines get to say publically, is to start out with what amounts to "academic compromat" (scientific fraud, plagiarism, ...).
Did this physicist / media star recently say something controversial?
I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?
Not really. This is the consequence of an investigation by some journalists about a decade ago, and an audit that lasted for almost 2 years.
> I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?
He is a smooth talker and by all accounts good at vulgarisation. He does well in interviews and is easy to deal with for journalists. There’s always been controversies but media thrive on those.
They compiled a document with the source material side-by-side https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
This goes well beyond accidentally triggering a plagiarism detector.
> Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from.
The examples in the article use very distinctive wording. One or two occurrences would be forgivable as coincidence or inspiration. An entire document full of examples points to something else.
This wasn't a couple cases of the same words or word pairs being used.
People say how obvious the parlor trick is when they look at a small model LLMs. Well, I've seen the same parlor trick in students who get good grades but seem weak at thought from fundamentals. It seems quite possible to me that in some examples we are now going after them because the environment changed. At much earlier points we did actually value the people who could recite even if somewhat brokenly because we lacked random order recital tools.
This is just how scholarship works. It's not needed in the kind of day to day most of us do, but when you're writing a thesis for a PhD, this stuff matters. You're making the argument that you're expanding the totality of human knowledge with your dissertation, and that requires strict source citing to separate your original scholarship from the sources that influenced it.
I imagine any tool that’s good at plagiarism detection would also kill it at this kind of literature research.
An example of something where it worked like this is that I had some ideas around how tribes evolve and so on and wrote them as I could think of them and ChatGPT was able to find that Darwin’s Cathedral had a far better synthesis of various much more rigorous takes on the subject.
These tools compare words, not idea. They would not detect someone copying concepts but coming up with their own words. I guess some specially fine-tuned LLMs could work but I am not aware of a company actually licensing those for plagiarism detection.
There have been a lot of plagiarism accusation in his books already. In this case there was an audit and the conclusions are clear. Whole paragraphs copied and pasted word for word without attribution, about a third of the document overall. If anything, this should have happened about 15 years ago.
Sadly, this idiot won an award before I was able to see their work, so they had the confusion of receiving an award, and THEN being told they were being spanked for unacceptable behavior. Since they were too stupid to hide the most blatant clues, they had a hard time comprehending this duality.