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What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks

Researchers argue over whether ‘novel’ AI-generated works use others’ ideas without credit.
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  1. Ananya

    1. Ananya is a freelance journalist and translator based in Bengaluru, India.

Conceptual illustration showing an image of a flower built out of fragments from smaller flowers.

Illustration: Martyna Wędzicka-Obuchowicz

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This January, Byeongjun Park, a researcher in artificial intelligence (AI), received a surprising e-mail. Two researchers from India told him that an AI-generated manuscript had used methods from one of his papers, without credit.

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Nature 644, 598-600 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02616-5

Updates & Corrections

  • Clarification 03 September 2025: This feature has been modified to mention Benjamin Hoover’s employer rather than his academic affiliation.

References

  1. Lu, C. et al. Preprint at arXiv hhttps://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.06292 (2024).

  2. Park, B. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.09176 (2024).

  3. Gupta, T. & Pruthi, D. in Proc. 63rd Annu. Meet. Assoc. Comput. Linguist. Vol. 1 (eds Che, W., Nabende, J., Shutova, E. & Pilehvar, M. T.) 25721–25738 (2025).

  4. Si, C., Yang, D. & Hashimoto, T. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2409.04109 (2024).

  5. Lin, Z., Trivedi, S. & Sun, J. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.19187 (2023).

  6. Krueger, D. & Memisevic, R. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1511.08400 (2015).

  7. Jonschkowski, R. & Brock. O. Auton. Robots 39, 407–428 (2015).

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