To the Remnant

AI and the Changing Face of Plagiarism

As a retired professor of ESL, I have been watching developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the past few years with interest, particularly ChatGPT, which is a chatbot and virtual assistant. OpenAI, which spawned ChatGPT, was founded in December 2015; ChatGPT was launched in November 2022. The pace of change in our contemporary world is absolutely astounding!

One area related to AI which has been of particular interest to me is plagiarism. As I thought about it, I realized that plagiarism can be roughly divided into three eras: pre-1995; 1995-late 2002; and late 2002-present. I suppose that plagiarism has been around as long as colleges and universities have been in existence. We can roughly define it as including the ideas of others in your writing (or speaking) without giving credit to them. When I was in college, we were warned of the consequences of plagiarism, including possible expulsion; therefore, we were taught how to cite others whose ideas we were using. This included using others’ exact words (which required quotes but should be done sparingly) as well as paraphrasing the ideas of others; either way, we had a healthy fear of the consequences of not citing. (A side note: several years later when I was teaching in a Third World country, I discovered that my students were freely plagiarizing; when I talked to them about it, they had a very hard time understanding it because in their culture, using the ideas of famous writers without citation was good and right! I had to adjust how I thought about it.)

The launch of Windows 95 marked a sea change in society, as the Internet became widely available and accessible. Along with it came early search engines, such as WebCrawler and Lycos. Three years later, Google was launched, and there continue to be other search engines as well, such as DuckDuckGo. On the one hand, search engines made plagiarizing easy for students; they could simply copy and paste from a given website. However, the danger was that suspicious professors could do a search themselves to detect possible plagiarism, as some of my own students discovered! In one of my classes (in the U.S.), without revealing the perpetrator, I showed the class an essay and the website from which it was copied, word for word. Interestingly, the perpetrator spoke up and admitted her “crime.” Since I hadn’t said much, if anything, to this class about plagiarism yet, I gave her a 50% on it, but it was now very clear to the class what plagiarism was.

As I alluded to at the outset, ChatGPT has been around a mere year and eight months; among other things, it has ushered in a whole new kind of plagiarism, with a twist. Students can use ChatGPT to essentially write paragraphs and essays; what it produces is an amalgamation of ideas from various sources. I have seen some examples of what ChatGPT produces, and it often looks “stilted,” meaning that it lacks individuality and sounds rather robotic. Turnitin (created in 1998) is a tool widely used by teachers to help them determine whether a student has plagiarized. And now, it has an AI Writing Indicator, which is a percentage indicating the likelihood that a student’s writing was AI-generated. In fact, to make it even better, the portion(s) of the writing that are “suspicious” are highlighted. This is a great tool for professors! However, proving plagiarism is more difficult than when a student (like mine, above) simply copies and pastes. At the same time, ChatGPT users need to be careful because of a phenomenon called “hallucinating.” This is when the writing contains factual errors and sometimes outright nonsense. Thus, if students are using ChatGPT to quickly produce something without checking and editing the product, the plagiarism can be very obvious.

Last year, a designer of ChatGPT reported that he told it to write WhatsApp messages using his unique writing style (including emojis); only 10% of his friends were fooled into thinking that he had written them. Similarly, after seeing multiple examples of a student’s writing, professors come to know a student’s “voice” to some degree. If you’ve taken composition classes, particularly at more advanced levels, you’ve probably heard professors talking about developing your own “voice” as a writer, meaning that each writer has his or her own unique style. One of my favorite examples of this is when a student of mine included this sentence in her narrative essay: “My husband lost his smile.” That is truly a wonderful sentence, expressing something unique that I doubt a chatbot could ever produce.

I have to admit that I’m glad I retired when I did, for numerous reasons; one of them is ChatGPT. If I were still teaching, one thing I would do is significantly increase in-class writing, using a pencil and no electronic device. I would also put a stronger emphasis on citing, depending on the level of the ESL class I was teaching. When students have to cite, using ChatGPT becomes more difficult.

I suppose it sounds like I am very down on AI and its applications. Actually, I understand that it has many amazing uses, including robotics, most obviously. And over the decades, I have enjoyed a lot of good sci-fi in books and movies that include AI! I also understand that AI has wonderful applications in many sectors of society; health care is one obvious example.

Since my blog is focused on Biblical answers to questions and issues, what does the Bible have to say about plagiarism? I think that both the eighth and ninth commandments apply here. Exodus 20:15-16 tell us, “You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” When students plagiarize, in essence they are stealing someone’s ideas because they are not giving them credit for it. They are also in essence lying by implying, “This is my work” when it’s not.

AI, including ChatGPT, has made our world more complicated, certainly including when it comes to plagiarism. Teachers can instruct their students about it and urge them not to do it, but some are going to plagiarize, regardless. Thankfully, there are tools and strategies to help teachers deal with it. May we who claim the name of Christ not plagiarize, and may we instruct our kids why they shouldn’t do it, either.

A final note: I never use AI when writing anything, including my blog posts. If I ever get to the point where I can no longer write clearly, I will simply stop writing them!

How Much Should Christians Give?

When my wife and I were newlyweds, we were part of a church that occasionally included a bulletin insert called “The Church around the World.” It included news snippets about God’s people, the church, in various countries, including the U.S. One news item that caught my eye was the percentage of income given by American Christians. I was shocked to read that the average was only 3%.

This recently came to mind again because of a conversation centered on giving that came up in my Sunday-school class. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may have noticed that I like referring to statistics, particularly percentages. While they don’t tell a complete story, they can be very illuminating. Thus, you probably won’t be surprised that I decided to research the percentage of giving by American Christians now. Two different websites gave the same figure: a paltry 2.5%. In other words, over the last 35 years, giving has decreased by 17%; this dovetails precisely with another statement about giving, which is that 17% of American families have reduced the amount that they give to their local church. (The time frame was not specified.) Lest we think that our giving somehow correlates with financially hard times, think again: during the Great Depression, the figure was 3.3%.

When some American churchgoers talk about giving, they mention tithing, which means giving 10%; this is because the leadership of some churches teach that we ought to tithe. As always, we need to examine Scripture for ourselves to see what it teaches. In the Old Testament, tithing was mandatory for the Israelites, but is it mandatory for us in the New Testament? As a support for continued tithing, some have referred to Matthew 23:23, where Jesus says, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.” Jesus says the same thing in Luke 11:42. Speaking to the Jewish leaders, Jesus affirmed the OT law of tithing, but He said that there were other matters of the law that were more important. There is one other New Testament book, Hebrews, where tithing is mentioned, but there is nowhere in the New Testament where God’s people, the church, are commanded to tithe. Why? Because we are not under the Old Testament law, which is emphasized especially, but not only, in the book of Romans. I refer you here to an excellent, more detailed post about tithing by a brother in Christ who goes by the name Sola Scriptura: https://followingjesuschrist3.com/2017/09/03/tithing-and-the-new-testament-church/comment-page-1/#respond I also refer you here to a post I wrote about Christians and the Old Testament law, which briefly mentions tithing but is focused on the Ten Commandments: https://keithpetersenblog.com/2020/10/29/are-christians-obligated-to-obey-the-old-testament-law/

If Christians are not obligated to tithe, then how much should we give? I believe that 2 Corinthians 9:6-7 answers this question, but not with a percentage: “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” These are wonderful verses! They encourage us to give generously and cheerfully. And let me repeat from verse 7: we should give what we have decided in our hearts, not reluctantly or under compulsion.

Less than a year after I got married, my wife and I went to a Third World country to teach English under the auspices of a Christian educational organization; we were generously supported with both money and prayer by many brothers and sisters back home. When we returned to the U.S. after three years, we didn’t have much at first, but we were determined to give generously (and cheerfully!) anyway, just as we had been given to while we were overseas. After another three years, we moved to the city where we were teaching. The pastor of the church we joined there taught that we should tithe. While I disagreed that tithing was an obligation, my wife and I decided to tithe to our church and then also to give to other charitable organizations, including ones that people we knew were working for/through. And sometimes, albeit less often, we would give money directly to an individual brother or sister. Frankly, it wasn’t much different from what we had been doing the previous three years anyway. (We have continued something close to that at our current church as well.)

One thing I liked that our pastor way back then said was that tithing was like “training wheels;” in other words, start with that and then give even more. Interestingly, I came across this statistic: 77% of Americans who tithe give 11%–20% or more of their income, which I suppose might support the training wheels analogy. I believe that pastor honestly thought tithing was obligatory for the New Testament church; in other words, I don’t believe that he was teaching it just to “get money” (including his salary). At the same time, I believe he was wrong.

I should add that some might ask something like, “I don’t feel cheerful about giving; should I do it anyway?” I would say, if you’re a believer and you’re not giving yet, start with something, no matter what the amount may be; if you’re already giving, then keep doing it. Either way, I believe the cheerfulness will come, and you will have the desire to give more. Maybe the lack of cheerfulness is because you’ve been feeling the compulsion of having to give a set percentage, which is not what the New Testament teaches.

Let me close with Psalm 125:5-6, another pair of my favorite verses. Notice again the words “sow” and “reap:” “Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.” When I think of these verses, I think of godly pastors, missionaries, and others who spread the Gospel; financial giving is one of the things that helps make it possible. May our financial giving be both generous and cheerful, not because we feel under compulsion, but because it is a means to strengthen God’s people and to help draw others to faith in Jesus Christ.

The Death of DEI in Business?

The abbreviation DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) has become a common way of signaling goals in both education and business, particularly since the death of George Floyd four years ago. DEI has two primary foci: race and sexual identity/orientation. In other words, the goal of DEI programs is to have broader representation from different races/ethnic groups and the LGBTQ community.

This may seem like a laudable goal to some, but the word “equity” merits a closer look because of its similarity (at least in spelling) to “equality.” Historically, when people talked about equality, it meant equality of opportunity; however, over time it has come to mean something closer to equality of outcomes. Equity-focused initiatives take this a step further, seeking to not only increase people of “color” and people from the LGBTQ community in the workplace, but to have a “chief diversity officer” as part of companies’ executive-level managerial teams, for example.

A year ago, the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision effectively did away with race-based university admissions, and it appears that businesses have also taken note. Here are some examples of businesses distancing themselves, at least to some degree, from DEI over the past year.

By mid-2023, DEI-related job postings had declined 44% from the same time a year prior, according to data from job site Indeed.
Devika Brij, CEO of Brij the Gap Consulting, which works with tech companies’ DEI efforts, said that some companies had cut nearly 90% of their DEI budget by mid-2023.
At least six major U.S. companies, including JPMorgan Chase, revised their diversity policies last year after receiving multiple public shareholder letters that said their DEI programs constitute illegal discrimination and breach the directors’ duties to investors.
Mentions of DEI in S&P 500 earnings calls took a nosedive from 34 in the fourth quarter of 2020 (seven months after George Floyd’s death) to just 4 in the fourth quarter of 2023 (six months after the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision).
Google fired ~50 employees two months ago in connection with their sit-in protests at two of its offices. They were protesting Google’s cloud-computing contract with Israel.

You might question whether the last example is about DEI. I would say that it is because 1) Members of the terrorist group Hamas, which attacked Israel, have darker skin than Israelis; 2) People who favor DEI programs tend to be Democrats, and the protesters against Israel since the invasion by Hamas last October have been heavily Democratic.

Fundamentally, DEI programs and initiatives have as their goal preferential treatment based primarily on skin color and sexual orientation/identity, not on ability and skills. Some have called it a form of reverse discrimination in the same way that people have talked and written against affirmative action for decades. When Florida governor Ron DeSantis banned DEI initiatives at public universities, for example, he said that what DEI stands for is “Discrimination, Exclusion and Indoctrination.” Your politics may or may not align with DeSantis’s, but I think most people would agree there is a lot of truth in his statement. Furthermore, DEI has become an object of mockery thanks to the Internet meme “Didn’t Earn It,” recently popularized by Ian Miles Cheong, a conservative journalist, and Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist. Like it or not, that meme also conveys a good deal of truth.

Thanks to the Supreme Court decision last year, we have reached the point in the U.S. where we should be able to put affirmative action in the rearview mirror. I think that eventually, we will be able to say the same of DEI. Six months ago, Elon Musk said, “DEI must DIE.” I agree, and the sooner the better.

Living Alone as a Status Symbol

I recently came across an article by Juliana Kaplan and Rosalie Chan about millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) who are currently living alone. For some context, in 1967, the percentage of 18 to 34-year-old Americans living alone was a mere 2.6%, but by 1981 (the year of the first millennials), that percentage had tripled, to 7.8%. Since then, the percentage has oscillated between 7.2% and 8.9%; last year (2023), the figure was 8.8%. I couldn’t find a more recent stat for millennials only, but in 2019, 9% of millennials were living alone, which is almost the same as the 8.8% figure.

The article by Kaplan and Chan focused on nine millennials who are living alone. Here is a key quote: “While their situations vary, they all said that living alone is very much a sacrifice — but one worth making.” Jess Munday, 29, said that she enjoys having space, along with being able to leave it clean or messy, depending on her mood. Aria Velasquez, 32, values privacy and coming home to nothing but “the hum of the fridge.” Julia Mazur, 30, is unique among the nine millennials in that she owns a house. She says that living alone is “empowering;” she likes the ability to move around and to travel.

This quote from social scientist Bella DePaulo gives some insight into millennials’ attitudes about living alone: “Marriage is no longer the marker of adulthood that it once was. Now younger people are more likely to feel like they’re an adult if they’ve had other accomplishments, and sometimes living alone is one of them. Living alone can mean that you can afford to do so, and that’s something to feel proud of.” Along those lines, the thing about the nine millennials that struck me most was that none of them mentioned marriage as a goal. As I was reading what they said about the benefits–having space, privacy, the ability to travel–the word that came to mind was freedom. When they can afford it, many millennials like the freedom that living alone offers and, as DePaulo mentioned, living alone is a kind of accomplishment, even a status symbol.

It is well-known that the average age of first marriage continues to increase. The average age for all men on their wedding day is now 30, compared with 28 for women. The Pew Research Center has reported that millennials tend to have more education than previous generations and that they tend to marry someone with at least their level of education; 75% of married millennials with at least a Bachelor’s degree have a spouse who is also a college graduate. On the other hand, women have higher graduation rates. For the 2021-22 academic year, women earned 58.6% of all Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees; they also earned 57.0% of all doctorates and professional degrees. I suppose you could say that the significantly higher number of women (compared with men) who have college degrees “limits” the number of “available” men to marry. On the other hand, it seems millennial men with at least a Bachelor’s degree have more choice.

As I was researching all of this info about millennials’ living situations, I found myself reflecting on my own life (I’m a “boomer”) in terms of times when I was living alone. First of all, I’m the youngest of eight kids, and I didn’t even have my own room until I was 12. Furthermore, I lived alone for only one summer, about three months, and while I enjoyed the freedom to some degree, I was working 45-55 hours a week, so I didn’t spend a lot of time in my apartment anyway. Other than that summer, before marriage, I was living with either my parents or roommate(s), which seemed very natural to me. Being married was also something that seemed very natural to me; indeed, it was something I looked forward to, and I got married at 28.

One thing that being married–and especially having kids!–usually makes people do is become more responsible. I certainly found that to be the case; elsewhere, I have written about accepting responsibility as a key component of Christian manhood; you can click here for Part One (of two) if you’re interested: https://keithpetersenblog.com/2020/08/26/what-does-christian-manhood-look-like-part-1/ I’m not saying that unmarried millennials are irresponsible, but simply that marriage and kids naturally engenders increased responsibility in people, which I think is a good thing.

There’s an old song by the soft-rock band Bread called “Hooked on You” (1977). (Yes, two posts in a row quoting songs by them; I’m showing my age.) Here are a few lines:

So don’t be feelin’ sorry
For the freedom that I lost
‘Cause I found out what I’m missin’
And I’m glad to pay the cost

For myself, whatever “freedom” I had as a single was something I was more than happy to give up, to a large degree. My guess is that as millennials grow older (the oldest are already 43), many who are now single will find that they want to share their life with a spouse–and children.

Is It Love or Infatuation?

I was recently listening to some songs by a soft-rock band named Bread; they were in their heyday in the early 1970s, at a time when I was about to transition to teenage-hood. Some of you reading this probably also grew up listening to them. Their songs are almost all about romantic love in one form or another, but there are two particularly striking ones that I didn’t understand at the time. One of them is called “Diary,” about a guy who discovers a diary written by a girl. He thinks the words of love are about him, but then he finds out they’re about another guy. Here are the striking words at the end:

“I will wish for her, his wife
All the sweet things she can find
All the sweet things they can find”

Another song by Bread in a somewhat similar vein is “It Don’t Matter to Me.” Here are a few striking lines:

“It don’t matter to me
If you take up with someone who’s better than me
‘Cause your happiness is all I want”

Admittedly, not all of Bread’s music is about this kind of incredibly unselfish love that wants the happiness of the other person, even if it’s not with the songwriter. Here are a few lines from “Aubrey,” for example:

“And Aubrey was her name
I never knew her, but I loved her just the same
I loved the name”

That song is clearly about infatuation, not love. However, it was the unfathomable love of “Diary” and “It Don’t Matter to Me” that I continued to come back to in my heart and mind, still not understanding it. A few years later, I started college, and about halfway through my Bachelor’s degree, I became a Christian. I also came across a transformative book around that time called Sex, Love, or Infatuation: How Can I Really Know? (I still have it.) Being a hormonal 20-year-old, I truly wanted to understand the difference between love and infatuation. Ray Short, who was a Methodist minister and professor of sociology, laid out 14 key clues in the form of questions to distinguish love from infatuation. Here they are:

What is your main interest? What attracts you most?
How many things attract you?
How did the romance start?
How consistent is your level of interest?
What effect does the romance have on your personality?
How does it end? [if it does]
How do you view each other?
How do others view you two? What’s the attitude of friends and parents?
What does distance (long separation) do to the relationship?
How do quarrels affect the romance?
How do you feel about and refer to your relationship?
What’s your ego response to the other?
What’s your overall attitude toward the other?
What is the effect of jealousy?

A few years later, I met a beautiful, godly young woman who I enjoyed getting to know. Among other things, we shared the desire to teach in the same Third World country–and in fact, we eventually did, albeit in different parts of that country. After 2+ years of friendship, our relationship changed into something different. I didn’t have Short’s book with me at the time, but a couple of “clues” in particular jumped out in my mind and heart: #3 (how our relationship started) and #9 (the effect of long distance/separation–and I do mean long!). When she came back to the U.S. a year before I did, we continued to write each other letters (yeah, those things people used to write with pen and paper) that took ten days to reach each other; that meant I had to wait three weeks until I got her response to a given letter. We also sent each other cassette tapes (remember those?) with our voices on them, speaking to each other in monologue. As we continued to correspond, it was obvious to me that what we had was love, not infatuation. (My intended agreed!) I proposed as soon as I got back to the U.S.; we got married six months later; and eight months after that, we returned to that Third World country as newlyweds. 35+ years later, we’re still happily married (in the U.S.).

Returning to Short’s book: he gives this summary clue that is a real stunner: In real love, you love the person so much that you want him or her to be happy–even if you aren’t the one who gets to share that happiness. Does this remind you of those first two Bread songs I quoted at the outset?! Short says if this kind of love is mutual: “There aren’t many loves like that around.” I would agree! He goes on to say, “In most cases, of course, such love need not be denied. The couple will spend their lives together [married], devoted to the joy of making each other happy.”

I can’t say that my wife and I had that kind of remarkably selfless love before we got married; in fact, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind and heart around it. Regardless, Short’s book was transformative in helping me distinguish between love and infatuation at an important time in my life. I know that a number of you that I’ve been getting to know in the blogosphere over the past four years are somewhere in or close to my age range, so this post may not be as directly applicable to you as it could be to your kids or grandkids. (Feel free to share, as always.) However, I know that I also have some younger readers. Speaking of reading: thankfully, Short’s book is still available on used-book sites like thriftbooks.com.

I should add, as well, that I can see how someone who’s married might twist Short’s (and David Gates’s) words into something like this: “My husband or wife would really be happier without me, so I think it’s better if I leave. After all, their happiness is all I want.” That would be a lie from Satan. What the person should do, instead, is learn how to love his or her spouse better. The Five Love Languages (by Gary Chapman) is a great place to start.

May those of us who are married continue to love our spouse increasingly selflessly. May those who are not married–but would like to be–find words of wisdom in Short’s book that will help in choosing the right person to spend the rest of your life with.