Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman is floating an idea to deploy artificial intelligence plagiarism detection tools across elite college institutions, calling it the next logical step after Harvard University lost its president in part due to such technological examinations.
“Every college and university in the world is going to have to do the same for themselves. They will do so because they will need to validate all plagiarism accusations, or someone else will do it for them,” Ackman wrote in an extensive post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
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Last night, no one at @MIT had a good night’s sleep.
Yesterday evening, shortly after I posted that we were launching a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board, I am sure that an audible collective gasp…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 7, 2024
Harvard alum Ackman had been one of the most outspoken critics of the school’s former president, Claudine Gay, before she stepped down last week amid criticism for congressional testimony she delivered about antisemitism on college campuses and later for her own academic papers, which journalists revealed she had evidence of plagiarism in numerous writings dating back to the early 2000s.
The prominent financial figure announced Saturday he will begin large-scale checks of work against Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth, who also faced backlash for equivocating when pressed at a congressional hearing as to whether calls for violence against Jews violated her university’s codes of conduct.
But Ackman said his checks shouldn’t be for just MIT or Harvard, but should cover every elite institution in the country, noting the “best approach” is “probably to launch an AI startup to do this job,” noting his interest in investing in one.
“If every faculty member is held to the current plagiarism standards of their own institutions, and universities enforce their own rules, they would likely have to terminate the substantial majority of their faculty members,” Ackman wrote, adding that “maybe that’s a good thing.”
Ackman’s own wife, Neri Oxman, has come under plagiarism allegations recently, which he argues are retaliation for his repeated calls to university presidents to resign over their stances toward antisemitism on college campuses.
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“The weaponization of AI for plagiarism has become the tactical nuke of the U.S. higher education system,” Ackman continued in his X post, contending that if “plagiarism nukes get into the wrong hands, even more damage can be done to our [higher education system] and the country.”
Ackman said because of human error or the potential for sheer human laziness, there needs to be some “percentage standard” to label more egregious instances of plagiarism, arguing “it wouldn’t be fair to say that two papers are both riddled with spelling mistakes if each has 10 mistakes, when one paper has 30 pages and the other has 330.”
