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French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation

97 points by bookofjoe

by Aurornis

10 subcomments

> found instances of plagiarism on 20% of its pages, Guémart says, with fragments copied from intellectuals including author Albert Camus, physicist Louis de Broglie, and even some members of his thesis committee.
Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move.
I can't read enough French to understand every detail, but the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim: https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...
He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly.
At the same time, it's no longer necessary to pick sentences from other people's work and change the phrasing. You can take someone else's paper, feed it into an LLM, and tell it to rewrite it for you. Easier than ever before to launder text.

by paytonjjones

0 subcomment

I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts.
The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes.
Should they have used quotation marks? Technically, yes. But using them breaks up the flow for the reader, and it's not like they are failing to give credit to Einstein.
As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.

by mikgp

0 subcomment

We need like an international plagiarism body to give you a stamp of approval when you write your dissertation so this doesn’t come back to bite you 20 years later.
A lot of times when I read certain plagiarism examples (Claudine Gay for instance)
Like plagiarism seems like it can happen for three reasons:
1. You intentionally tried to take someone else’s effort / ideas and make them your own. Real bad
2. You were lazy didn’t read enough to know to attribute correctly. Not great?
3. You were writing about a set of ideas that only have so many ways to express them. You really didn’t know.
I’m not saying we should give plagiarism a pass but maybe a statute of limitations? It seems really hard to tell 20 years later. Because to a certain extent - is this a case of 1? Did he pass of effort as his own? Or, if he has attributed Camus would you say “fair ‘nough mate, wasn’t central to your innovation”
Maybe we need to assess every paper ever written and figure out which percentage can be accused of plagiarism. Intuitively it seems like the number would be high.

by autoexec

0 subcomment

The university should suffer consequences as well since their thesis committee completely failed to do their job, especially those who didn't even notice they were the people whose work was being plagiarized. Since it's been demonstrated that you can successfully copy/paste your way to a PhD at this university this calls into question the validity of every other PhD obtained there.

by MinimalAction

1 subcomments

Given the advent of LLMs, I don't know if plagiarism is ever a thing anymore. Nobody is stupid enough to include verbatim unless citing those works. Feed into an LLM to get a paraphrased version conveying the same meaning.
It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.

by maxall4

1 subcomments

This is rather reminiscent of the Bogdanov affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair

by adalacelove

0 subcomment

It reads like those nightmares where you need to pass final exams again.
I guess nowadays it is much simpler to correlate some text with prior work, more so with LLMs. It is like those doping cases where several years later we are able to detect a previously unknown sustance in an old sample.

by nobrains

0 subcomment

Its the same guy who tweeted a photo of a pepperoni claiming it to be a star

by lejeanvaljean

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Knowing the political ideas of some journalists from "Arrêt sur Images", I would like that they also criticize other people than someone named "Klein".

0 subcomment

by cronyism2026

1 subcomments

It is more frequent than you think. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14614

by aag

0 subcomment

“You may note however that the university has not issued any statement refuting the information reported in the press.”

by jeremyscanvic

0 subcomment

That's wild I didn't expected the plagiarism to be that blatant. Extra shocked as a French who enjoyed listening to many of his talks

by Barbing

1 subcomments

>Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said.
Borg?

by jklinger410

0 subcomment

More blood will be spilled of unsuspecting academics before the credulity of the science industrial complex can be restored.

by wiether

1 subcomments

> One of France’s most famous science communicators
Never heard of him

by leephillips

1 subcomments

Too bad Harvard doesn’t have similarly high standards.

by psychoslave

0 subcomment

>clearly gives a strong impression of cronyism
God damn¹, Louis XIV’s country that inspired La société du spectacle to Guy Debord is actually a great place to make a career as a courtesan, who would have guess.
Guillotine images in streets are also on the rise: I can no longer make the smallest road trip without seeing some plastered all around.
Looks like neither the wanna shine as elite in the bonnes gens side nor the drive me to unsustainable pauperized state in the crowd can refrain from their extreme propensities.
¹ https://www.capmemo.fr/sciences-humaines/983-le-mariage-de-f...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

by ttoinou

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Ironic especially given he spent the last 6 years going on all french public debate spaces to uniquely talk about "ultracrépidarianisme" / Dunning–Kruger effect and tell everyone they should listen to the real Scientists (like him, of course) and not the people-not-approved-by-media-and-state

by moralestapia

2 subcomments

I'm glad to see this as a start.
As much as ~60-70% of current academia leaders have bogus credentials and engage in plagiarism (from their colleagues, students, etc...).
It's just terrible, we live in a modern dark ages because of this.

by anthk

1 subcomments

The French since Derrida won't produce anything better than academic postmodernist nonsense slop but without needing the outputs from LLM degradation. OTOH, the VLC and FFMPEG/Qemu creators should be put first as the good examples on being a good French STEM people instead of the 99% of bullshitters at TF1 debating nonsense which IMHO they became largely irrelevant since Francis Bacon and Pascal. These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits about them and that's the recipe for disasters such as Sokal.

by logifail

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[flagged]

by TheJCDenton

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[dead]

by utopiah

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Ah yes... Etienne, very eloquent otherwise. /s
For a bit of an equivalent more US tech people could appreciate, he's kind of the national local Lex Friedman. He initially focused on this domain but then gradually had more and more famous guests across any field where he didn't have the required expertise.

by morninglight

0 subcomment

The French can be profoundly petty. This smells like an act of personal / political revenge. Klein has a long standing as one of France's best-known scientists and a gifted popularizer of science. If a crime was committed then it is clearly his thesis committee that should be punished.
Shall we now impute dishonor on all those whose past writing cannot pass an AI examination? Do we start with Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, George Gamow, Michio Kaku, ...?
In any case, we need to hurry. You may not care, but there is some jackass in France who is losing sleep.

by alphabeta3r56

2 subcomments

I don't know whether his popular science work is plagiarized or not but about his thesis, it seems somewhat stupid To punish him
So many things in physics have to be written in a very specific manner , to convey the meaning of the precise concepts being used. in such cases, it is a very common practice to copy the sentences used before, in order to ensure that everyone understands the meaning in a precise manner.
So then to call it plagiarism doesn't make any sense