Billionaire Bill Ackman is vowing AI-powered plagiarism reviews of Massachusetts Institute of Technology leaders and faculty amid his ongoing feud with the school’s leadership and a fresh accusation aimed at his own wife.
The Pershing Square Capital Management founder and CEO said Saturday in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that his Friday announcement of a plan to use artificial intelligence to conduct a "plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President [Sally] Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board" likely elicited "an audible collective gasp that could be heard around campus."
"Why? Well, every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others," Ackman wrote.
"Interestingly, while AI can identify plagiarism, AI itself is the ultimate plagiarist. Large language models are by design built off the work of others, as computers have no innate knowledge, at least not yet," he added. "As a result of AI, all institutions of higher learning are going to have to update their plagiarism standards."
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Ackman called for similar probes at other elite universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Penn and Dartmouth because those schools "will need to validate all plagiarism accusations, or someone else will do it for them."
"The best approach, however, is probably to launch an AI startup to do this job (I would be interested in investing in one) as there is plenty of work to do, and many institutions won’t have the resources to do it on their own," he said. "Perhaps more importantly, the donors are going to demand that the review is done by an independent third party."
Ackman went on to explain that in cases where a given paper fails an AI-powered plagiarism test, the response should depend on the type of plagiarism – whether it arose due to the "laziness of the author" or the writer made unintentional mistakes, or if it appeared to be a more "pernicious" instance like "when important ideas are intentionally stolen without attribution."
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The MIT Corporation, which serves as the university’s board of trustees, told FOX Business in a statement, "Our leaders remain focused on ensuring the vital work of the people of MIT continues, work that is essential to the nation’s security, prosperity and quality of life."
On Thursday, Business Insider reported that Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman plagiarized in her doctoral dissertation. Oxman, a former MIT professor, acknowledged omitting quotation marks and apologized in a post on X, and added that she will check the citations and "request that MIT make any necessary corrections."
After Ackman announced the plagiarism probe of MIT’s leadership and faculty on Friday, the outlet published a follow-up piece that accused Oxman of plagiarizing portions of her dissertation and other papers, including passages from Wikipedia and other scholarly and technical writings.
Ackman responded to the follow-up story in his post on Saturday, saying that Neri will review the new allegations when she has time to do so. He also questioned whether using definitions from Wikipedia without citation should be considered plagiarism, saying, "I think that’s worth an important discussion among the experts. It does not strike me as plagiarism, nor do I think it takes anything away from her work. I am not sure who would even complain that they were not cited properly."
Ackman called for the resignations of Kornbluth, Claudine Gay, who resigned last week as president of Harvard under allegations of plagiarism, and Penn President Liz Magill in the wake of their December congressional testimony about the response to antisemitism on their campuses. Magill resigned almost immediately, while Gay only quit after facing nearly 50 allegations of plagiarism in her academic works.
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"I did not originally seek Claudine Gay’s removal as president of Harvard due to plagiarism allegations. In fact, from the beginning I was simply trying to help her address the rise of antisemitism on campus… I only sought former President Gay’s removal after her congressional testimony," Ackman said. "And I didn’t just seek her removal, I advocated for the removal of all three university presidents who all happened to be women: a Black woman, a White Christian woman, and a White Jewish woman."
"Getting back to Kornbluth, Gay and Magill; in my opinion and that of many others, they are failed leaders of our country’s most important institutions, and all three lack the necessary moral clarity that is critical for leaders, particularly during this challenging time in history," Ackman added. "That is why I and many others believed that they should resign or be fired."
