Lawyers for Harvard and its president Claudine Gay tried to dismiss allegations she was a plagiarist as having been created by “ChatGPT.”
They sent a 15-page legal tirade to The Post which launched a bizarre conspiracy theory that the 27 instances in which her work appeared to closely resemble that of other academics may have been uncovered by using Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbot.
The letter, sent in October to The Post’s attorneys, threatened a lawsuit if the newspaper published allegations of plagiarism against Gay.
The letter was sent before the Harvard Corporation, the board which runs the Ivy League school launched its own secret investigation into numerous allegations of plagiarism against the embattled president — in effect clearing her in advance of the probe.
“Indeed, there are strong indications that the excerpts cited by The Post were not in fact the ‘complaints’ of a human complainant — but rather were generated by artificial intelligence or some other technological or automated means,” wrote Thomas Clare and David Sillers in their Oct. 27 letter to The Post.
It was sent three days after The Post asked Harvard’s communications department for comment on the alleged plagiarism.
“If these indications are correct, and the ultimate source of these examples is an algorithm-generated list created by asking ChatGPT to (for example) ‘show me the 10 most similar passages in works by Claudine Gay to other scholarly works’ it is no ‘complaint’ at all,” the letter continued.
“It is, instead, manufactured news. Rest assured that, in any legal proceeding made necessary by the publication of defamatory allegations of plagiarism, we will explore in discovery the source and provenance of these alleged ‘complaints.'”
In fact, Gay is having peer-reviewed journals correct two of the instances of alleged plagiarism which The Post asked her to comment on — even though her lawyers falsely told us that all her work was “cited and properly credited.”
Harvard declined to comment on whether it still stands by the claims about ChatGPT.
The university and Gay face a congressional inquiry about the allegations of plagiarism and their handling of them.
