He’s going up and down the length of Florida, looking for the real killer
Or, in this case, the real plagiarist
1. The academic grifter
Remember the giraffe guy? The USC medical school professor who wrote a book, “The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature’s Lessons for a Long and Happy Life,” containing material plagiarized from the website of a South African safari company?
In his sorry-not-sorry apology, he wrote, “I was recently made aware that in writing The Book of Animal Secrets we relied upon passages from various sources without attribution, and that we used other authors’ words. I want to sincerely apologize to the scientists and writers whose work or words were used or not fully attributed.” Which at first sounds kinda contrite, until you realize that earlier he’d written, “I’m not pitching a tent to watch chimpanzees in Tanzania or digging through ant colonies to find the long-lived queen, for example . . . I went out and spoke to the amazing scientists around the world who do these kinds of experiments, and what I uncovered was astonishing.” So, no, he didn’t do that. He’s a liar who hired someone to write a book and put his name on it, and it was his misfortune to hire an incompetent person.
From a public-relations effort on his part: “Agus says he dictated the substance of the book; [co-author] Loberg added the color.” But then when he read the book, he would’ve noticed that he never dictated the “substance” of “Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About a Giraffe.” I.e., he’s lying. He did not actually dictate the substance of the book, except in the coldly logical sense that the book actually has no substance. The next logical step is for the ghostwriter to hire a ghostwriter, etc.
On the plus side, unlike some famous Columbia University medical school professors, this USC guy doesn’t seem to have committed multiple sexual assaults on patients, nor does he seem to have been hawking dubious dietary supplements on TV. All he did is waste our time and attention; he didn’t directly mess with anyone’s health. Also, one of his books seems to have been endorsed by Lance Armstrong, which seems pretty appropriate. I guess maybe Dan Ariely wasn’t available to write a blurb at that time. Also, he was listed as “CEO of the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine and a contributor to CBS News,” which seems to fit the direction where that formerly proud TV network has been heading.
This USC guy doesn’t sound like much of a scientist or much of a writer, but he seems to have mastered the ability of grifting from the super-rich, and grifting is the one skill that rules all others.
Indeed, in this Theranos-soaked era of elite academics promoting vaccine denial and then joining the government, it’s kind of refreshing to see a celebrity professor who’s pure grift, no harm.
2. The media grifter
The above story about the plagiarized giraffe stories came out a few years ago. I was reminded of it when reading this post from Patrick “Only If You Get Caught” Redford, who shares a recent plagiarism story from New York Times reporter Ben Mullin about Steven Rosenbaum’s new book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality. Here’s Redford:
Several of the quotes in the book attributed to real people are themselves not real. The meta-textual elements of Rosenbaum’s fuckups, given that his book is about AI’s powers and limits, are really something. From Mullin’s story:
One of the quotes is attributed to Kara Swisher, a prominent technology journalist, in a chapter about AI lies. “The most sophisticated AI language model is like a mirror,” the book says Ms. Swisher wrote. “It reflects our own morality back at us, polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface. It’s not bound by Asimov’s laws or any ethical framework—it’s bound by the patterns in its training data and the objectives set by its creators.”
Swisher never said that, and neither did several of the other experts that Rosenbaum quoted. Rosenbaum said he was also launching an investigation, which is a crazy thing to say abnout a book you ostensibly wrote, to see what else his writing assistants hallucinated in the process. “As I disclosed in the book’s acknowledgments, I used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” he told the Times. “That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility.”
What an asshole (Rosenbaum, not Redford, or Mullin, or Swisher). From the NYT story:
Mr. Rosenbaum . . . is the executive director of the Sustainable Media Center, a nonprofit that, according to its mission statement, is dedicated to giving “a new generation of media consumers” and creators “ownership of their increasingly media-centric lives.”
Also:
One chapter about the effects of social media and fabricated videos on teenagers attributes two quotes to “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain,” by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University.
“Emotions aren’t just reactions to truth — they’re how we construct truth,” the book quotes Ms. Barrett as writing. “When young people say something ‘feels true,’ they’re describing a sophisticated process of meaning-making that integrates emotional and social signals.”
Ms. Barrett said in an email to The Times that the quotes “don’t appear in the book and they are also wrong.”
“I would never say ‘emotions aren’t just reactions to the truth’ — they are not reactions and ‘truth’ in science is a complicated concept that I tend to avoid,” Ms. Barrett said. “Also, I would never say that ‘emotional and social signals’ are integrated — there are no emotional or social signals, per se. There are signals, and the brain creates their meaning as emotional or social.”
But get this:
Mr. Rosenbaum said that if the episode “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.”
“These A.I. errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and A.I. and its impact on society, democracy and editorial,” he added.
3. The football star
As O.J. might have said:
If I indeed did it, this serves as a warning about the risks of celebrity culture, that is why I killed.
These murders do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the crime raises about truth, trust and football and its impact on society, democracy, and editorial.
OK, scratch that. The retired Buffalo Bills running back was famously inarticulate, but I can’t believe he’d be so incoherent as to talk about “its impact on society, democracy, and editorial.”
In the words of Bertrand Russell, “This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.”