The Memphis Psychologist Tracing Plagiarism From Chaucer to Chatbots

Roger Kreuz, a professor of psychology at The University of Memphis, has built a career explaining how people actually use language, and his most recent book pulls that work directly into the debate over AI-generated text. Titled Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, it frames today's anxieties about machine writing as the latest chapter in a much older story about copying, ownership, and originality.

Kreuz has been on the Memphis faculty since 1988, where he now also serves as an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, according to his Psychology Today contributor profile. He earned graduate degrees in cognitive psychology at Princeton University. His research sits in psycholinguistics and cognitive science, covering how and why people use nonliteral language such as exaggeration and verbal irony, the strategies behind spoken and written discourse, and how communication shifts across email, texts, and tweets.

Why the plagiarism angle matters now

The timing of Strikingly Similar is what makes it relevant beyond the psychology shelf. Large language models produce text by recombining patterns learned from vast bodies of existing writing, and courts, universities, and publishers are still working out where recombination ends and appropriation begins. By placing chatbots on the same continuum as centuries of human borrowing, Kreuz's framing treats the question as a cultural and psychological one, not only a legal or technical one.

His blog posts extend that thread. One entry, "Unconscious Plagiarism: Fact or Fiction?", examines the claim writers and musicians sometimes make that they copied inadvertently, and asks whether psychological research actually supports the idea. Another, "The Paradox of Self-Plagiarism," looks at aging writers and artists who recycle their own earlier work, arguing that the practice is not automatically a problem. Those pieces suggest Kreuz is less interested in policing copying than in understanding the mental mechanics behind it.

A broader body of work on language

Plagiarism is one of several public-facing subjects Kreuz has written about for general readers. His books include Becoming Fluent, on how cognitive science can help adults learn a foreign language; Changing Minds, on the two-way relationship between aging and language; and Getting Through and Failure to Communicate, both on miscommunication. He has also written Linguistic Fingerprints: How Language Creates and Reveals Identity and Irony and Sarcasm for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. According to his profile, his books have been translated into Korean, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish.

Several of his recent posts track how internet culture reshapes vocabulary. He has written about the spread of the "-maxxing" suffix seen in terms like "looksmaxxing," the gaming slang entering everyday English, and the rise of "vibe" as a word that privileges feeling over fact. Other entries take on accent bias and what he calls the degendering of English.

The takeaway for readers in AI-heavy markets

For developers and companies across Asia-Pacific building or deploying generative tools, the value in Kreuz's work is contextual rather than prescriptive. His framing does not settle whether a chatbot's output counts as plagiarism, and it does not offer legal guidance. What it provides is a reminder that the copying question predates the technology by centuries, and that the psychology of authorship is unlikely to be resolved by a single policy or product feature.