Crossing the Line to Plagiarism

September 14, 2026

What is plagiarism?

Not long ago my ninth-grade granddaughter showed me a short story she had written and asked if I would comment on it. I read it and found it to be a sweet story about a squirrel who ate a magic acorn that gave him the power to fly. The story was well written with a beginning, middle, and ending. And it presented the squirrel’s story in a way that kept my attention.

But there was something familiar with the way the story was told. Too familiar. After complimenting her effort, I asked if she had used AI for any of the story.

“Oh, yes!” she said. “Everyone uses AI.”

The story provided a teachable opportunity. A few weeks later, I told her I was looking for an ending to a novel I was writing. I said I had come up with an ending that I thought would work. I asked her to read it and give me her opinion. She anxiously agreed.

In my story’s ending, Frederic, my protagonist, takes Catherine (the woman Frederic loves) to a hospital because she is having a baby. Complications result in the baby’s death, and then Catherine dies as well. Frederic talks to the doctor to see if there is anything he can do. The doctor says no and offers to take him to his hotel. Frederic refuses the offer.

Then he enters the room where Catherine’s dead body lies in a bed. Two nurses tell Frederic that he must leave, but he refuses and makes them leave instead. He views Catherine, but she seems like only a statue. After a few minutes, he leaves the hospital and walks back to his hotel in the rain. And that was the way I ended my novel.

I asked my granddaughter what she thought.

“I like it,” she said. “It’s good.”

“It is good,” I said. “And it was just as good when Ernest Hemingway wrote it one-hundred years ago in his novel, A Farewell to Arms.”

We proceeded to have a good conversation about plagiarism and what it meant: the taking of another person’s exact text and claiming it as your own work. The ending in my story would have been quickly identified as having been copied from Hemingway’s iconic ending. And rightfully so.

Then we returned to her short story about the flying squirrel and her use of AI in writing it. We both agreed that copying a robot’s work and calling it your own is no less plagiarism than stealing the work of a human? It is plagiarism. Nothing less.

But I wanted her to know something more. Authors who claim a robot’s work as their own have robbed themselves of writing’s greatest reward—the pure enjoyment of the creative process. I want her to write for that reason—the joy of the process—not for any perceived reward that might come at the end of the process.

I think she agreed with the message. At least, I hope so.