The driver and the dolly — On AI, plagiarism, and the imaginary pact between writer and reader
If a writer uses AI to smooth a clunky sentence, have they betrayed you? What if they used it to draft a headline? Or a whole paragraph? The New York Times freelancer case is the occasion, but the real question is older — and starts with no longer seeing LLMs as alien intelligences.
Imagine a sober person gets in theyr car and hit badly a pedestrian on a crosswalk. Wouldn't it be weird if a newspaper ran the headline "Man arrested for driving a car"? I think we can all agree that the problem wasn't getting behind the wheel: it was hitting the person. Sure, if he hadn't driven he wouldn't have hit anyone, but that's not why the cops showed up.
The Guardian ran basically that strange headline, and nobody blinked because it involves an embarrassing case of plagiarism and artificial intelligence: The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review.
The freelancer — named and shamed as if this were some major public safety issue — did use an LLM (large language model, the kind of AI behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.) to write the review. But the actual problem is different: parts of his text are identical to a review of the same book previously published by the Guardian. Plagiarism, plain and simple.
If he hadn't used AI, he probably wouldn't have included those passages — or he would've noticed and cited them properly. It’s also possible the contrary: sometimes phrases lodge in your brain and you genuinely can't remember whether you read them somewhere or came up with them yourself. There's no way to know. But I think we can — and should — acknowledge that AI use is relevant here. But it’s like driving in the car accident example: the problem is the plagiarism, not the use of AI. And in fact it's not the reason the New York Times ended the collaboration. The paper doesn't ban AI: their ethics code only requires that substantial use be disclosed for transparency. And indeed the paper issued a correction, adding a link to the original Guardian review and faulting the freelancer not for using AI, but for his “reliance” on it.
The New York Times ethics code is the closest thing I can imagine to a "pact" between publisher/writer and reader. But it'd be naive to think readers' expectations stop at that code. So it's legitimate that — plagiarism aside — a review written with AI assistance might feel like a betrayal. Because for many people, the pact includes the expectation of reading the product of honest, maybe even painstaking, intellectual work.