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I am convinced that Lehrer has a cavalier attitude about truth and falsehood. This shows not only in his attitude toward quotations but in some of the other details of his writing. And a journalist who repeatedly fails to correct errors when they're pointed out is, in my opinion, exhibiting reckless disregard for the truth. It is thus my opinion that Lehrer plagiarized others' work, published inaccurate quotations, printed narrative details that were factually incorrect, and failed to address errors when they were pointed out.

Lehrer's transgressions are inexcusable—but I can't help but think that the industry he (and I) work for share a some of the blame for his failure. I'm 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published. When we screwed up, there was likely someone to catch it and save us (public) embarrassment. And if someone violated journalistic ethics, it was more likely to be caught early in his career—allowing him the chance either to reform and recover or to slink off to another career without being humiliated on the national stage. No such luck for Lehrer; he rose to the very top in a flash, and despite having his work published by major media companies, he was    operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.

Why aren't the students who use these services crafting their own essays to begin with?

Here is where the real problem lies. The idea of paying someone else to do your work for you has become increasingly commonplace in our broader culture, even in the realm of writing. It is well known that many actors, athletes, politicians, and businesspeople have contracted with uncredited ghostwriters to produce their memoirs for them. There is no law against it.

At the same time, higher education has been transformed into an industry, another sphere of economic activity where goods and services are bought and sold. By this logic, a student who pays a fair market price for it has earned whatever grade it brings. In fact, many institutions of higher education market not the challenges provided by their course of study, but the ease with which busy students can complete it in the midst of other daily responsibilities.

If you are familiar with the notion of “common knowledge” from earlier writing experiences, you may have noticed that its definition is easy to state, but can be hard to apply in a particular case. The “common” way to talk about common knowledge is to say that it is knowledge that most educated people know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary. Thus, you might not know the date of the most recent meeting of the Federal Reserve, but you can find it out quite easily. Further, the term “common knowledge” carries the sense of “communal” knowledge—it is community information that no particular individual can fairly claim to own. One sign that something is community knowledge is that it is stated in 5 or more sources. So, if it’s known to educated people, or can be easily looked up, or appears in many sources, it is likely to be “common knowledge” and so does not need to be cited.

Because the notion of “common knowledge” is ambiguous and depends on context, you should always check with a professor or TF if you have any doubts. Some reference books will say “if in doubt, cite it,” but you don’t want to over-cite, so check with your readers to try to fix the line between common and specialized knowledge.

This advice about “common knowledge” is true for all disciplines—think about your audience and the course attitude, recognize when you’re writing as an expert, and always check with professors if you’re in doubt. The sciences, however, have a somewhat different notion of “common knowledge,” coming partly out of research practice and partly out of more collaborative work methods. Ideas, findings, and methodologies that are new knowledge (and therefore specialized rather than common knowledge) become old knowledge more quickly in the sciences. The answer, again, is to consider the messages you’re getting from the course about what concepts are common or foundational, and to check in with professors or TFs.

Byzantium – or more properly, the medieval Roman Empire – controlled much of the Mediterranean at the height of its territorial rule in the mid-sixth century.

His premise is that when Rome fell, the Byzantine Empire went on to preserve a white-European civilization. This isn’t true.

Mentions of Byzantium are scattered across message boards frequented by both white supremacists and QAnon enthusiasts – who spout conspiracy theories about a deep-state cabal of Satan-worshipping, blood-drinking pedophiles running the world.

we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought

if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I