We are already living in the postplagiarism era. Artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies are becoming part of everyday academic life, changing how we write, learn, teach, and create knowledge.
First explored by Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton in 2021 and developed into an explicit scholarly framework in 2023, postplagiarism invites us to rethink how academic integrity can be understood and practised in a world where human and machine contributions increasingly intersect.
As Eaton and Kumar (2026) explain, postplagiarism describes a period in which technologies are so deeply integrated into academic life that they cannot easily be separated from education, and humans increasingly create knowledge alongside machines rather than acting as its sole authors. The question is no longer simply whether technology has been used. It is how, why, and under what conditions it is used – and who remains responsible for the resulting work.
What Is Postplagiarism?
Postplagiarism is a framework for understanding academic integrity in an era of advanced technologies. It recognizes that established approaches to plagiarism, authorship, and attribution need to be reconsidered as human–AI collaboration becomes increasingly common. Rather than treating AI only as a threat to academic integrity, the framework provides a way to explore the ethical challenges and possibilities of working with emerging technologies while maintaining human agency, transparency, and responsibility.
The Six Tenets of Postplagiarism
Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton (2023) articulated six tenets that provide a foundation for understanding postplagiarism.
- Hybrid writing, co-created by humans and AI, becomes the norm.
- Human creativity is enhanced rather than threatened by AI.
- AI lowers the language barriers that have long divided writers and readers.
- Work can be offloaded to AI, but responsibility cannot. Humans remain accountable for what is produced.
- Attribution remains important, understood as respect for those we learn from rather than as the technical mechanics of citation.
- Inherited definitions of plagiarism, never universal to begin with, require rethinking.
Researchers
Prof. Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada
Dr. Rahul Kumar, PhD, Faculty of Education, Brock University, Canada
