I agree that weaponizing plagiarism to achieve much dirtier political agendas is poor practice. But I also believe that this strategy is mostly successful because most people have a poor understanding of what plagiarism is and is not. And that includes many academics including prof Andrade. From a legal perspective, plagiarism is copyright infringement. Copyright is only one form of intellectual property. It recognizes that creating a certain amount of novel text requires a lot of work and creativity, and an author should therefore be protected against copycats benefitting (e.g. financially) from it without having invested themselves and without giving the original author a fair share. This is often confused with a more academic definition of plagiarism (and prof Andrade mixes them up), which is passing on an idea as your own though you got the idea from someone else. This is not a copyright infringement, as an idea is not something that can be copyrighted. Nor is it a patent infringement, as an idea cannot be patented either (for an idea to become a patent, i.e. another type of intellectual property, it has to be developed into the description of an actual invention, i.e. a new machine, method, or system, which requires considerable investment and creativity). Passing on an idea as your own is nevertheless acknowledged as academic misconduct: it is basically (implicitly) lying about the facts. So prof Andrade did not plagiarize the first-century Jewish teacher as this teacher’s text is not copyrighted and prof Andrade acknowledges that any idea behind the text is not his. The same goes for his use of the expression “what goes around comes around”: this has become an accepted idiom in English and by no means do we need to refer to the original author for every broadly accepted expression. This brings me to my last point, about students using ChatGPT and the like. Unless a learning outcome of the course is “how to write an essay”, I do not see any issue with students using ChatGPT for writing an essay for a course that has e.g. “how to use concepts from the electrical engineering literature in creating new ideas” (or so) as a learning outcome. In many ways, ChatGPT is not much else than Google Search, but with the results provided in, well, the form of an essay. The student still needs to do a lot of literature reading and research to get rid of the mistakes made by ChatGPT, and to discover any ideas that ChatGPT has not properly attributed. In many ways, this is not much different from the work that a student has to do anyway to prepare for the writing of a good essay. In my own courses (I teach cybersecurity), I just assume that students use ChatGPT: I raise the pass level, and reduce more marks for small mistakes. And still report a missing reference as (minor) academic misconduct. This includes referring to ChatGPT as the creator of the text: although OpenAI (the owner of ChatGPT, which is just a machine) allows free use of the output of ChatGPT (and thus there can be no copyright infringement), an academic should not create the impression that they themselves created the text. Because that would be cheating. See also European Commission, NEWS BLOG, 20 February 2023, “Intellectual Property in ChatGPT”.