Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This is not the first time someone has said this, and it won't be the last, as it becomes apparent that plagiarism tools - whether based on AI or not - are an unreliable indicator of the originality of a paper. Numerous factors play into this - that there are only so many ways to make a point, that there are various ways to reference an original source, that the reuse of a phrase may be incidental rather than core to the paper. And so on. I mean, I wrote the preceding sentences off the top of my head, after having read the article, and yet I couldn't swear that they are 100% original and would pass a plagiarism checker. Would it matter if there was some overlap? Should I check everything I write against TurnItIn? You know what would be better than a system that makes blanket assertions of cheating? A system that simply inserted a link to the original text. Then it doesn't matter what out intentions were, doesn't matter whether we used quotation marks, doesn't matter whether we were 'cheating'.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Aug 28, 2025 9:11 p.m.

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