An Unethical AI ethicist?
There are two Reddit posts in r/AskAcademia and a more detailed and updated vroniplag page (this specific page contains all of the 52 segments found in Andreas Theodorou's thesis) documenting Theodorou’s plagiarism case, presented below.
Andreas Theodorou obtained his Phd from the University of Bath. He was formerly an “integrated” Visiting Associate Professor at UPC and was previously a researcher at Umeå University. He was also the founder of Verai AB, a company related to AI ethics which he led with his mentor Virginia Dignum.
His thesis includes multiple plagiarized passages that largely evade standard detection software.
It appears that Andreas has taken steps to avoid being discovered. He appears to have methodically inspected each of his plagiarized sentences with a content similarity detector and made minor changes to them in order to avoid being caught. Many of these phrases can still be found via a manual google search.
Copy-pasting certain words in his Phd thesis(https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/files/195601231/andreasTheodorouThesis.pdf) is sometimes unreliable perhaps rendered so intentionally in order to minimize the chances of it being searched/checked for similarities with other works .
A plain text version of it, that was created with an online OCR app(https://www.onlineocr.net/) can be found here.
We have determined that the documents where the copied text originates were published much earlier than his thesis.
Some of the parts of his Phd thesis that are plagiarized can be seen below:
The left hand side represents text from Andreas' thesis and the right hand side text from previously published uncited sources(for more info see the Ath vroniplag page)
He copied this from https://www.irjet.net/archives/V3/i10/IRJET-V3I1053.pdf
Copied from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6191667/
Copied from https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ChrisSimpson/20140717/221339/Behavior_trees_for_AI_How_they_work.php
This case is being more formally and extensively investigated by vroniplag here:
https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/Analyse:Ath
Since we have only checked a rather small part of his thesis and found plagiarized sections on average once every fifth sentence, it is very likely that the rest of his work contains a significant number of plagiarized sentences that are slightly paraphrased in order to not be easily detectable. Based on our short sample, we estimate it to be around 20% of the thesis.
Theodorou has claimed that the segments found are just "common phrases", this is highly unlikely to be the case since the identical text is usually more than 9 consecutive words and is only found in a single earlier source from which there are frequently multiple 9+ consecutive-word identical phrases in his Phd.
Theodorou made this claim, implying that ideas or results are more important than how they are expressed. However, in academic fields such as AI ethics and more generally in the so-called 'softer' sciences the opposite is often true: the importance and difficulty lies not so much in producing original ideas, but in articulating them in a way that conveys originality or depth.
This is due both to the nature of these disciplines, where the boundaries between originality and repetition of ideas are more fluid, and to the fact that many journals and conferences in these areas tend to adopt more relaxed standards of evaluation and publication(partly due to their assessment criteria being significantly less objective than those of the harder sciences) .
This explains why prominent cases of plagiarism tend to involve scholars from these areas—such as the recent incidents involving Harvard Professors Gay and Gino.