I guess nowadays it is much simpler to correlate some text with prior work, more so with LLMs. It is like those doping cases where several years later we are able to detect a previously unknown sustance in an old sample.
Never heard of him
God damn¹, Louis XIV’s country that inspired La société du spectacle to Guy Debord is actually a great place to make a career as a courtesan, who would have guess.
Guillotine images in streets are also on the rise: I can no longer make the smallest road trip without seeing some plastered all around.
Looks like neither the wanna shine as elite in the bonnes gens side nor the drive me to unsustainable pauperized state in the crowd can refrain from their extreme propensities.
Âą https://www.capmemo.fr/sciences-humaines/983-le-mariage-de-f...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move.
I can't read enough French to understand every detail, but the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim: https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly.
At the same time, it's no longer necessary to pick sentences from other people's work and change the phrasing. You can take someone else's paper, feed it into an LLM, and tell it to rewrite it for you. Easier than ever before to launder text.
As much as ~60-70% of current academia leaders have bogus credentials and engage in plagiarism (from their colleagues, students, etc...).
It's just terrible, we live in a modern dark ages because of this.
So many things in physics have to be written in a very specific manner , to convey the meaning of the precise concepts being used. in such cases, it is a very common practice to copy the sentences used before, in order to ensure that everyone understands the meaning in a precise manner.
So then to call it plagiarism doesn't make any sense
Cheating in life isn't necessarily that bad, if you are at the end of your studies and it's either you pass by cheating, either you don't, then the only logical thing to do is to cheat, who would go in more debt and potentially ruin their live doing otherwise, and WHY?
2. If you need to use the exact same phrase as someone else, then you should cite them
Fun fact: he's using this to prove he didn't do anything wrong, as in "see? the people on my thesis committee didn't care I copied their own work, why should anyone else?"
The truth is, people on "thesis committee" don't read thesis. Some do. The director usually does, if he has the time. But many don't; they glance at the intro and conclusion and call it a day.
> He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly
He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich. If you murdered someone before DNA testing was available, that doesn't exonerate you in any way.
The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means. Even if it fits the letter of the definition, on a phd thesis that may or may not be a big deal. If he’s passing off the ideas of others as his, or faking his research by using the results of others or making them up, then that’s really bad. If he’s just using phrases / wording from others to get his original points across, it looks bad but I don’t see it as a huge deal, especially 30 years out from the phd.
A PhD is supposed to be original research, if the originality or integrity is in question that’s one thing, the rest is much more pedantic, even if technically wrong.
What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?
They link to the document that shows the plagiarized sections side by side with their sources
https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
I don't read enough French (especially at PhD thesis level!) to parse everything, but even I can see phrasings copied from the source documents in a lot of the examples. Some of them weren't even paraphrasing, they were lifting the exact distinctive word choices.
introduction1 -> main1 -> conclussion1
introduction2 -> main2 -> conclussion2
introduction3 -> main3 -> conclussion3
the thesis is something like
long introduction -> easy example -> main1 -> main2 -> main3 -> main of preprint -> long conclussion
But the process of creating that work, engaged throughought that process with those purported to be more practiced, is usually pretty good at seeding enough expertise and confidence that you might be able to proceed more independently and with real novelty, or might at least be prepared to share the trade with others new to it.
That's the point of those years, and so it's more than a little ironic that AI is being used to undermine a practicing expert while simultaneously eroding the traditional process for becoming one by making it so easy to just generate slop and engage with hallucinations than to actually practice writing deep work or engaging with primary sources.
There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.
(Another one, unrelated, but also wild, argues that people who attack him are in fact against science itself, that they want to go back to the Middle Ages, etc.)
It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters!
One of France’s most famous science communicators has been stripped of his doctor’s title after a 20-month university investigation found evidence that he plagiarized in his Ph.D. thesis.
Étienne Klein, a physicist at the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) who has published more than 30 books and hosts a weekly radio show about science, has faced accusations of plagiarism in his popular science writing since 2016. In August 2024, questions arose about his scholarly work as well, when the online outlet Arrêt sur images examined Klein’s doctoral dissertation in philosophy of science, which he defended in 1999 at what is now Paris Cité University. After manually checking and cross-referencing the thesis “line by line,” journalists Loris Guémart and Jean Abbiateci found instances of plagiarism on 20% of its pages, Guémart says, with fragments copied from intellectuals including author Albert Camus, physicist Louis de Broglie, and even some members of his thesis committee. Their article led the university to launch an investigation.
On 11 June, Arrêt sur images reported, based on anonymous sources, that Paris Cité had concluded Klein indeed committed plagiarism and the university had revoked his doctorate. (The report, which the university hasn’t made public, found plagiarism in nearly two-thirds of the thesis’ pages, another source told the French newspaper Le Monde.)
The university has not confirmed the press reports. “Since this situation involves an individual case, the law does not permit the university to comment on it or disclose any information regarding it,” Paris Cité President Édouard Kaminski wrote in an email to Science. But, he added: “You may note however that the university has not issued any statement refuting the information reported in the press.”
Klein did not respond to Science’s repeated requests for comment, but he didn’t dispute that he lost his title in a four-page statement he posted on X on 12 June or in his comments for the story in Le Monde.
Klein faced setbacks a decade ago when the French weekly magazine L’Express reported he had plagiarized extensively in his science books, including an Albert Einstein biography, and columns. After an independent investigation ordered by France’s higher education and research ministry, Klein lost his position as president of the Institute for Advanced Studies for Science and Technology in 2017, but he kept his position at CEA. (CEA told Science on Friday it was aware of the university’s decision and is “considering the consequences.”)
Klein’s career in science communication, however, seemed unscathed. He has authored more than a dozen books since 2016 and he went on hosting his radio show on France Culture, a public radio station. In 2020, the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences awarded Klein a prize for one of his physics essays.
The fact that prestigious publishing houses and media outlets in France kept working with Klein despite the revelations “clearly gives a strong impression of cronyism, or at the very least of leniency,” says Olivier Sartenaer, a philosopher of science at the University of Namur who has followed the case. The media and the public continued to regard Klein as a “very respected” figure, Sartenaer says. That may change now: “We have taken note of [the university’s] decision and are reviewing the situation,” France Culture writes in an email to Science.
In last week’s letter on X, Klein discussed the accusations at length without using the word plagiarism. Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said. He asked why his dissertation was scrutinized even though others haven’t been and accused “quotation marks zealots” of a double standard by focusing on his writings—which, he says, contain no factual errors and help combat scientific disinformation—instead of pursuing actual disinformation.
Sartenaer says Klein’s use of such “fallacious” arguments sends a terrible message to students and researchers. He sees a silver lining, however: The university made a “brave decision” by sanctioning Klein, and it might increase people’s trust in scientific institutions to see that even someone of his fame can be punished for misconduct. “It’s a sign that the institution works.”
Correction, 16 June, 9:45 a.m.: A previous version of this story said Loris Guémart and Jean Abbiateci asked Paris Cité University to launch an investigation. The university took the initiative itself.