As we saw earlier, plagiarism isn't just about outright copying. According to the Random House Dictionary (1987), it also includes the "close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author."
This is an important distinction, because it means that even if you copy a passage from a website or an AI and then change a few words here and there to make it fit, it's still considered plagiarism. This is a common form of plagiarism known as patchwriting. It happens when a writer copies a passage and then tries to disguise it by deleting or replacing a few words. However, this isn't true wordsmithing, which is the hard work of choosing your own words and putting them in a unique order.
Random House. (1987). The Random House dictionary of the English language (2nd ed.). Random House.