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Are we all plagiarists now?

101 points by pseudolus

by xandrius

4 subcomments

Here is my very simple view:
- exact reuse of a long-ish word sequence(s) without credits -> not cool.
- complete/partial reinterpretation of an already existing story in different words -> it's fine
- Traced/almost identical image/drawing/painting (with the intent to fool someone) -> not cool
- Visual imitation in style/content but different approach or usage -> it's fine
I think people are too attached by the novelty of something, sure if I write a bunch of words and you repeat them as yours, that's not cool. But if something I make inspires someone and they take it, reframe it, rephrase it or whatever, go ahead.
People adore Star Wars, which is an absolute one to one of a hero's journey, it still has value. Most modern fantasy are basically fanfics of Middle Earth, still good that they exist.
Imagine someone just spamming sequences of notes at random for their whole life, does it mean they own anything else made here afterwards +70/80/90... Years?

by mbanerjeepalmer

9 subcomments

> Universities are increasingly turning to AI to spot AI-written work (even as students use services like Dumb it Down to make their AI-fuelled work sound more believable). It can be detected. Chris Caren, the boss of Turnitin, a popular plagiarism detector, describes plagiarised prose as “beige”: “well-written, but not very dynamic”. It has verbal tics: it is keen on dreary words like “holistic” and notably keen on “notably”.
I don't think you can say that AI-written can be reliably detected. Turnitin is only ~90% effective: https://teaching.temple.edu/sites/teaching/files/media/docum...

by jryio

6 subcomments

Think about how it feels when you toil on a hard problem, do your best work, release it to the work in the spirit of openness and sharing
Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.

by rectang

3 subcomments

Cutting back the power of creators dramatically increases the power of distributors. Do we really want the vast majority of economic benefit for human creativity to flow to middlemen?

by Nifty3929

2 subcomments

Without arguing the broader topic, I do think there's an important distinction between plagiarism in fiction and non-fiction or academic work: The theft of ideas
In fiction, taking ideas (hero's journey, middle earth, etc)[1] and adapting to a new story/characters is totally fine without attribution. There's probably only like 5 stories ever that just keep getting re-written this way.
But in non-fiction, academic research and the like, stealing ideas without attribution is a problem, because ideas are the whole point. Nobody reads a research paper for the plot.
But in school, and especially with non-fiction, we're so often told to "just re-word it to make it your own" which is actually the most insidious form of plagiarism. If I get an idea from you and want to include that in my paper, that's great, but I have to give you credit. Great non-fiction books I've read are riddled with citations and have 100-page bibliographies. The value of the book/paper is (often) in the synthesis of those ideas into something new, with maybe it's own ideas added on top. But "re-wording" does not make and idea your own, and does not escape a charge of plagarism.
[1] top comment as of this writing

by msteffen

1 subcomments

I think IP kind of breaks a lot of engineers' brains (despite how much of it they create) because a lot of IP law is about intent, and their theory of mind is so bad that the idea of a body of law based on deduced intent, and the ways a court might deduce their intent if they used someone else's IP, are totally alien to them.

by nnutter

0 subcomment

I'd highly recommend RiP!: A Remix Manifesto [Grokipedia](https://grokipedia.com/page/rip_a_remix_manifesto) [YouTube](https://youtu.be/quO_Dzm4rnk). It's been a long time since I watched it but I'll have to re-watch it. Keep in mind this came out almost 20 years ago, well before LLMs. I don't know where we'll land but humans are also remix machines, that's what creativity is, I think the beauty of what LLMs are is the first technology that has captured some essence of creativity. Of course, it's lacking direct emotion/sentiment but I also think people are failing to understand the role of the human in using the LLM. We are the final filter that is recognizing quality, projecting emotion/sentiment, etc.

by 1vuio0pswjnm7

0 subcomment

"But also, surely, because it is fun. Plagiarism stories follow a perfect tragic arc: a flawed hero suffers a whopping comeuppance. It is a wonderful spectacle."
The so-called "tech" company, flawed hero?
It does not produce content, only intermediates access to it
Now it can produce content
But to create a system to do produce content, "Generative AI", the so-called "tech" companies needed to use copyrighted material on massive scale without a license
Was that use infringing. The courts will decide
The intermediary (middleman) companies no longer need longer need "user-generated content" to attract an audience
Of course they will still intermediate and collect data from and conduct surveillance on anyone that uses their software, which generally they can use for any purpose

by zahlman

0 subcomment

> What counts as intellectual theft—and what is considered acceptable borrowing or inspiration—are the great questions of the AI era.... Part of the problem is that there is no precise definition of plagiarism—it ranges from verbatim copying to the fudgier theft of concepts.
> ...
> Moreover, using ChatGPT, Mr Kreuz argues, does not make you a plagiarist, since it is not cribbing from a single “original” text. He suggests LLMs are doing unacknowledged “ghostwriting”. To many that is too generous: this is still plagiarism, but with an AI accomplice.
Meanwhile, the site itself offers AI-powered narration for the article. The AI voice's vocal characteristics had to come from somewhere. Is it any different for prosody than for prose?

by beardyw

4 subcomments

Here's question, if nobody had ever written science fiction, would AI do it.
I don't think so.

by amelius

0 subcomment

Good artists copy, great artists steal.
-- me

by erelong

1 subcomments

More like maybe we are acknowledging "intellectual property" was always a fiction

by tiku

0 subcomment

I've built a react invoicing tool, I can't help but think that it probably ripped of a bunch of code. I've added my own touch now but it seems like it was wat faster with generation.but then again, it's hardly rocket science.

by telliott1984

1 subcomments

I really don't know how I feel about that Ctrl/Control joke.

by coldtea

0 subcomment

No, speak for yourselves.

0 subcomment

by mikelitoris

0 subcomment

Wow, I love the illustration!

by squirrellous

0 subcomment

Anecdotal perspective. I’m usually ok with others copying my code since code feels less personal (for lack of a better word). The other day I found a prompt for internal AI that copied my technical arguments in prose verbatim without attribution. This felt very wrong and invasive. It made me much more sympathetic to people with intellectual work out in the public domain.

by add-sub-mul-div

0 subcomment

We spend a lot of time talking about the fairness of how LLMs are trained but not enough time talking about the fact that mediocre people now have a faucet they can turn on to flood work and content into the world effortlessly at volume.

by renewiltord

1 subcomments

Something I found disappointing is discovering what plagiarists the ancient greats were. Take Paradise Lost for instance. The entire thing is unoriginal and fan fiction derivative work of the Bible (itself questionable)
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste…
Ummm, excuse me. This is literally the garden of Eden. In fact this idiot plagiarizes the name too. He actually calls this Eden. wtf. Fake as fuck. And people call this copy-paste artist who cites literally zero of his sources a “poet”.

0 subcomment

by geist67

10 subcomments

You’ve all been very silly with the idea of intellectual properties, copyright specifically.
Every generation throughout time has had the right to recreate the legacy of human thought through the filter of their own times.
“Cultural appropriation” and other knock off terms are objectively a part of every creative and functional cycle.
Give credit where credit is due, yet once let into the world a thought becomes a part of such wilds.