What If We Held ChatGPT to the Same Standard as Claudine Gay?

If you squint and tilt your head, you can see some similarities in the blurry shapes that are Harvard and OpenAI. Each is a leading institution for building minds, whether real or artificial—Harvard educates smart humans, while OpenAI engineers smart machines—and each has been forced in recent days to stare down a common allegation. Namely, that they are represented by intellectual thieves.

Last month, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo and the journalist Christopher Brunet then–Harvard President Claudine Gay of having copied short passages without attribution in her dissertation. Gay later to “instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” for which she requested corrections. Some two weeks later, Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging that the companies’ chatbots violated copyright law by