Bill Ackman: A Four-Thousand Word Tweet
& then there are six-hundred more words in his next tweet…
How it begins:
…& then it continues for another 4,000 words:
Why? Because of Business Insider:
Katherine Long & Jack Newsham: Bill Ackman’s celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman’s dissertation is marred by plagiarism: ‘The billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal…. [There is a] similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman…. Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation…
We will probably never know the real story underlying this—which is probably that:
there is someone who knows the literature well,
who is really pissed at Neri Oxman for some reason,
but who thought (rightly) that there was no mileage here:
that copying-wikipedia-paragraphs plagiarism could be shrugged off,
and dropping-quotation-marks-from-near-boilerplate-paragraphs plagiarism ditto,
until the whole thing was energized by the zap of the neofascist culture war lightning strike.
Plus there is the most batshit element:
Every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others…
Checking for plagiarism is a hugely parallel problem of checking for string matches that could surely be done much more efficiently than CPUs can by GPUs (and perhaps NPUs). But “AI”? Simple string-matching algorithms would be an order of magnitude more efficient, or two, than GPTs and their ilk. Plus string-matching creates few false positives. While if GPTs can be trained to do this they will create a lot of hallucinated false positives.
It appears that, for Ackman, “AI” is some kind of magical genie that he doesn’t understand, but that has its own Cave of Wonders…