Alright: I’ll begin with an acknowledgment that there’s no possible way what I’m about to write could come up with any definitive answer or solution to the problem I’ll be ranting about. But I continue in so many ways to be puzzled by motivations for plagiarism that I thought I’d try and put out some feeble feelers in an attempt to come to terms with my dudgeon.

The background: one of the many reasons I quit academia was because I got tired of spending a good third of my poorly paid time being faced with, proving, confronting offenders with, and imposing official repercussions for, plagiarism. A surprising number of (especially undergraduate) students had never been told what plagiarism is; in that case, if they were willing to mend their ways after being enlightened, fine; that first snag could be chalked up to ignorance, though I still raged at the educational disservice they’d been done. But then you had the kids who had zero desire to be there, didn’t care whether they learned what was on offer or not, and just wanted to be done with the whole thing without putting any thought into it. That, too, was understandable, if depressing; why not find something they did want to do? Case two became especially infuriating with grad students, who really didn’t need to be there if their heart wasn’t in the work they were doing—and who, if they felt such pressure to excel in their field that they grabbed in desperation for someone else’s words, should’ve known by that point what an idiot, backfiring move they were making.

There are all sorts of ways I could go off here about how US society has long touted a college—and now graduate—degree as the essential ticket to the good life, meaning one of financial and material wellbeing. The mindset seems to be that the work, knowledge, experience, whatever, isn’t the point in itself; it’s all just something to get through as quickly and cheaply as possible so you can get on with your real life of consuming more things. With the encouragement to get there however you get there, what’s the big deal with plagiarizing? You did the work of finding the pages to copy, after all.

What shouldn’t be blowing my mind, but still is, is the act of plagiarism among people who want to write books, poems, treatises, etc., simply because they want to do it—not because there’s any professional advancement beckoning, or any financial need for a side gig (in which case, they’d better pick something else, anyway). They’re just interested in writing something of their own.

I’m guessing what happens, at least among these would-be writers who’ve never really written anything else at all, is that you get slammed with the realization of just how hard it is to get your thoughts out on paper, much less get them sounding as great as you’d hoped. The reasoning may initially have been that everyone writes; it can’t be that hard. Other people have said what I want to say, and made it sound great—why don’t I take a look at how they’re doing it? And that’s still fine—but then you somehow go from taking the time to find a brilliant phrase to copying and pasting it, while being too lazy to take an additional two minutes to put it in quotation marks and credit who wrote it. Then, maybe once you’ve stolen a phrase, just absorbing a whole page or two doesn’t seem like a much bigger deal. And now with AI generating text for you—a possibility thanks only to others’ texts it’s fed on without permission or credit—I’m guessing the misgivings about absorbing words you didn’t put together on your own start to disperse pretty quickly. I mean, they’re just words we all use. What’s the big deal?

Again, there’s no way to make some general statement about why people feel compelled to steal in this fashion, or are unperturbed about passing off others’ work as their own. I get the sense, though, that living in an impatient, convenience-oriented, and efficiency-obsessed society has a lot to do with it. In such an environment, even something you’re interested in accomplishing doesn’t merit the slow time and effort needed to achieve it, much less excel in carrying it out. I suspect it turns out that you weren’t very interested in the doing of the thing at all—just in the end product, and the social media post that features it, that makes it look as if you had brought your project to completion.

I feel like I’m going down a cynical road that will only grow more perilous and filled with indignant ruts, especially if I can't find my way out of being a professional editor. And for the sake of my own mental health, I should just learn how to drop it and accept not only the lazy AI age that’s already here, but the probable (dis)informational free-for-all that’s about to descend on my native land in ways not even it has seen before. Maybe I can focus my energies on completing coloring books or paint-by-numbers. Then again, I could probably just find someone else's awesome-looking mandala and claim it as my own.

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