We live in a culture which celebrates quantity against quality and is indifferent to origin. The desire for popularity, mass acceptance, career mobility and prestige and the hope of a short public memory forces people to find ‘short cuts’. An entire industry of ‘research papers’ literally opens the path to plagiarism.

Old wine in a new bottle. That is all that is happening. Nothing new.

There is so much hue and cry about how writers, artists, researchers and many others are (mis)using AI tools to pass off as their own what is in fact an AI-generated content, be it text, images, sounds etc.

The good old word for all these is plagiarism. Has been around for long and is certainly not going away any time soon, notwithstanding all the noise.

The advent of AI is making things easier and more difficult – easier to misuse and more difficult to detect because it is widespread. Mumbai Mirror, April 5, 2026, front-paged a story ‘The high cost of artificial fluency’, highlighting the rising use of AI tools to ‘assist’ in writing, painting, creating artworks etc. It noted (Page 9) that The New York Times severed ties with freelancer Alex Preston as his writing was seen to be assisted by AI. Even before the advent of AI-tools, a few years ago, a leading journalist from one of the world’s most popular channels, admitted to plagiarism pleading lack of time, pressure of deadlines. He was censured but he is still where he was. No change.

Temptation

Oscar Wilde is believed to have said ‘What is temptation if you can’t yield to it!’.

The rise of social media and via that channel the rise of a new breed of celebrities, who wield a lot of influence, is a strong temptation that some people find difficult to resist. Getting found out is a matter of probability. It is simply a question of how many amongst those you intend to ‘reach’ will either have the time or the inclination to find out whether it is ‘yours’ or ‘AI-assisted’. In the current climate, you will probably be complimented for being ‘smart’. Ethics and integrity are not burdens most people need to carry. Expectations are so low largely because the reality of living today has reduced ‘ethics and integrity’ to the status of ‘outliers’! Tragic, but c’est la vie.

Some of you might recall how a certain stock broker became ‘famous’ in the mid-to-late 1990s for having used the banking system for personal gain. His popularity then rivalled film stars’! And there was a huge demand that he be made Finance Minister of India!

In such an environment, plagiarism will be the least of the problems for those who plan to resort to it. Some get called out, others don’t. A matter of probability.

Academia & Research – the inevitability of plagiarism

‘The problem with the pressure to publish’ points out that “Today, with over 5.14 million academic articles being published annually worldwide, competition is increasing and so are predatory entities, like paper-mills that prey on desperate researchers and threaten research integrity”. ‘Nature’ published an article titled ‘Pressure to publish is rising as research time shrinks, finds survey of scientists’, on November 7, 2025, based on a survey of 3,200 respondents.

The rise of the ‘research industry’ dates back to the World War II when governments needed the help of academic institutions. The subject of ‘Operations Research’ was largely a product of the logistical problems faced by the war machinery, with its demanding Mathematical and Statistical skills, an obvious field for universities and research institutions. Research became a respected field winning industry and government recognition.

However, from such legitimate beginnings serving specific goals, research has often turned in on itself, not looking beyond. Perhaps, such insularity offered a protection from incisive scrutiny. The number of research papers published together with its ‘impact measure’ became a critical factor aiding academic career. An entire system has grown which has nurtured a climate of ‘citing and being cited’ built on key phrases and words. The taxonomy of search has been a major contributory factor. And of course the mandatory book you must write, irrespective of whether it is read by anyone at all.     

For a completely different view on plagiarism, read  this article ‘Why Plagiarism Doesn’t Bother Me At All: A Research-Based Overview of Plagiarism as Educational Opportunity’, offering the view of a teacher who has evolved from someone horrified by it to a calm acceptance of it as a means of educating oneself, given that we now have a phenomenon of ‘institutionalised plagiarism’.

There is also the problem of using research as a lobbying tool. There are ‘research’ organisations who ‘produce research’ to suit the chosen goals of some entity (private and public). Such ‘research’ becomes a tool to lobby for policy changes. Selectively and deliberately using data to fashion a suitable and powerful narrative is no less an evil. And yet, this is hardly finds even a mention, let alone be discussed.

Such research and ‘surveys’ are very common in the tech world as it seeks to shape, change users’ behaviour.    

The endurance of quality not the dominion of quantity

Apart from the quest for popularity and an upwardly mobile academic-research career or journalistic career, it is the obsession with quantity that provides the trigger to resort to anything other than honest and sincere original work, but it is a misguided view.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two major books in his life – Logico-Tractatus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953). Both are intensely debated even today. It is not necessary to have a prodigious output to become influential. In fact, even in such a case, it is only some part of the total work that comes to wield influence, not all.

One of the most influential papers ever was what John Bell wrote in 1964, while on leave from CERN, the particle physics laboratory. It says this on its website: “On 4 November 1964, a journal called Physics received a paper written by John Bell, a theoretician from CERN. The journal was short-lived, but the paper became famous, laying the foundations for the modern field of quantum-information science”.

There was a debate then whether Quantum mechanics offered a complete description of reality (and still does), “until Bell, who was on leave from CERN at the time, wrote down what has become known as Bell’s theorem. Importantly, he provided an experimentally testable relationship between measurements that would confirm or refute the disliked “action at a distance””.

Isn’t it tempting to be John Bell?