With another professor I caught a flagrant case in a student thesis and we faced attacks from the university administration because the student had a stellar transcript (also not the positive signal some might think). Punishment was almost inexistent.

It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.

They compiled a document with the source material side-by-side https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...

This goes well beyond accidentally triggering a plagiarism detector.

> Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from.

The examples in the article use very distinctive wording. One or two occurrences would be forgivable as coincidence or inspiration. An entire document full of examples points to something else.

This is just how scholarship works. It's not needed in the kind of day to day most of us do, but when you're writing a thesis for a PhD, this stuff matters. You're making the argument that you're expanding the totality of human knowledge with your dissertation, and that requires strict source citing to separate your original scholarship from the sources that influenced it.

I imagine any tool that’s good at plagiarism detection would also kill it at this kind of literature research.

An example of something where it worked like this is that I had some ideas around how tribes evolve and so on and wrote them as I could think of them and ChatGPT was able to find that Darwin’s Cathedral had a far better synthesis of various much more rigorous takes on the subject.