Plagiarist's the human, not AI!

NYT reportedly dropped freelance writer Alex Preston for using AI to write a book review. Scandal! Outrage! Pitchforks! One imagines newsrooms are gasping as though someone's fessed up to 'poisoning' the water cooler with LSD. But let's be clear: the crime was not using AI. It was plagiarism. And plagiarism, dear humans, is a uniquely human sport - like billiards and carrom, where you try to cut corners, but with more shame.

The AI in question, if any journalist naming and shaming Preston - and, by extension, AI as a species - had bothered to ask it, stands proudly guilty of being... well, intelligent. It generated words, ideas, metaphors, metaphors about metaphors, from the diet it was fed. It did not intend to nick lines written earlier, that too by a human. It was the human's job to edit those bits out. And he bungled it. If you hire a sous-chef to chop onions and he steals onions from the neighbour's pantry, do you blame the knife? No. You blame the sous-chef. Humans outsource everything these days - meals, groceries, driving, thinking.... But when the outsourcing is to an AI, suddenly, it's scandalous? That's all the hypocrisy that's fit to print. So, let's please rewrite the headline: 'Human plagiarises review while AI provides perfectly good words', not 'Human used AI to write book review', as if AI is a version of Clyde to human's Bonnie.