A nice visual explanation.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2023/nov/01/how-ai-chatbots-like-chatgpt-or-bard-work-visual-explainer

Yikes, hadn't realized that AI forces teachers to run student papers thru plagiarism s/w before assessing their thought.  But could this open a new industry that certifies (w/a pretty seal) student papers as genuinely self-made before they are submitted to teachers?  Indie authors wrecked by AI could use the work.

Unless things have changed a lot since I retired, AI doesn't force teachers to do anything, and in any case, turnitin isn't AI. It's a pattern recognition algorithm--unless AI features have been added recently. But in any case, using turnitin is normally a teacher or school choice, not something compulsory. I highly recommend using it or something like it, however, for the reasons mentioned above.

Yikes, hadn't realized that AI forces teachers to run student papers thru plagiarism s/w before assessing their thought.  But could this open a new industry that certifies (w/a pretty seal) student papers as genuinely self-made before they are submitted to teachers?  Indie authors wrecked by AI could use the work.

I'm a big believer in the plagiarism software (Turnitin) that I used when I was teaching. But I could cite some horror stories about colleagues who just looked at the percentage of repeated text and didn't check the specifics. (Research papers would have all kinds of quotations from sources flagged, even though they were all properly cited. One would expect a higher degree of similarity in such writing than one would in an autobiographical piece, for example.) 

Ugh, Turnitin was such garbage. As both a student and staff at a college, I had access to turnitin and wanted to test it out on a paper. Like you said, it flagged passages that were direct quotes and properly cited. It also found 5- to 7- word sequences that had been used before, like "in this paper I will prove that" that it marked as plagiarized. Once, it even compared a rough draft submitted to my final paper and the percentage was something dumb like 85%. It even flagged portions of my bibliography as plagiarized. MY BIBLIOGRAPHY! Anyway, I have a hard time accepting these bots (they're not AI) as reliable methodologies to detect plagiarism.

Quote from: Bill Hiatt on October 15, 2023, 03:54:27 AM

All of that said, I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for Shakespeare's apparent knowledge of unpublished papers of Thomas North. Perhaps someone will address that as the scholarly debate continues.

If it is true that there are no surviving copies of the plays that Thomas North wrote, how can we be sure that what was found in North's unpublished papers wasn't also found in those plays?  We can't rule out the possibility that what is deemed today as having been unpublished wasn't circulated in some way back in the day where Shakespeare may have had access to it.

Perhaps I wasn't being sufficiently clear, but what you're saying is exactly McCarthy's point--that the only logical way for Shakespeare to have had that material would be if Thomas North included it in the source plays. Even if WS had somehow had access to the unpublished material, he would have had to dig through huge amounts of text to find things that fit into the play. North, being more familiar with his own material, could have borrowed from it much more readily than an outsider could have.

In other words, published material combined with unpublished material became the basis for North's plays. While WS made some modifications and additions, the vast majority of most of the plays came from North, not WS.

If McCarthy is right about chronology, the unpublished material North was drawing was often something he was working on when he wrote the plays that borrow from that material. By the way, copies of his published work from North's own library include his marginal notes. Interestingly, his only annotations cover a relatively small part of each work and relate mostly to material that ended up in the plays. Most of the surviving texts from the period are annotated throughout by their owners. North's very selective annotations are further evidence that he drew on his material to produce plays.

None of that means that Shakespeare contributed nothing. His fame is the only reason the plays in his name survived. The bulk of plays from the same time period didn't. And the reason he became a big name in the first place was that he knew how to please a crowd. If, as Feldman and Sams have both argued, some of the plays in the Shakespearean apocrypha are largely Shakespeare's work, we can see why. They aren't as intellectually stimulating or poetic as the plays normally attributed to Shakespeare, which is the reason scholars have long resisted attributing them to him. But if we see most of the attributed plays as largely the work of someone else, there's less reason to reject the contemporary title page evidence that Shakespeare wrote them. (One of them, Mucedorus, though not attested as WS's on the title page, did belong to his company and was one of the most performed and definitely the most printed play of time period.) Most of these plays had coarse humor, some bordering on slapstick, lots of action, and some other characteristics that tie them together. Shakespeare may have been writing them during the "lost years" during which we have no information about what he was up to. But he was referred to as a playwright earlier than the likely composition of any of the plays attributed to him. Some of the bad quartos of attributed plays also place more emphasis on humor and action than the canonical texts. Perhaps they were modifications for public performances. The canonical texts are more likely to have done well in performances at court.

To use a modern analogy, North is more like literary fiction. Shakespeare's own writing may have been more like what intellectuals would today call a guilty pleasure--not necessarily edifying, but definitely entertaining. (Think relatively unchallenging comedy or action flics where something blows up every few seconds--big box office stuff.) The attributed plays normally blend these elements. Shakespeare could have taken North's highly intellectual and poetic efforts and added some of his signature crowd pleasers.

Anyway, that's what I get from combining North's insights with those of Feldman and Sams, even though the last two don't agree with McCarthy's position on authorship. (Sams died before McCarthy published.)

Who knows what Shakespeare studies will look like in fifty years. For now, it's heartening to see that so many people even care. Of course, in a community of authors, that is what one would expect.