mckirk 2 days ago

But the text itself is not someone else's work verbatim.

A translation tool like DeepL is presumably trained on a huge amount of 'other people's work'. Is copying its result verbatim into your own work also plagiarism then?

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bdangubic 2 days ago

plagiarism - by definition - is copying someone else’s work.

the easier definition is “did YOU write this?” if answer is no - you plagiarised it and should be punished to the full extent.

mckirk 2 days ago

'Someone else's work' -- exactly. Not 'the output of some tool'.

I'm not saying what the guy did wasn't wrong or dumb, I'm saying: Plagiarism has a strict definition, and I don't think it can be applied to the case of directly copying the output of an LLM -- because plagiarism refers to copying the work of another author, and I don't think LLMs are generally regarded (so far) as being able to have this kind of 'authorhood'.

bdangubic 2 days ago

plagiarism does NOT refer to copying the work of another author, it refers to you submitting work as yours that you didn’t yourself write.

if I copy entire article from the Economist, did I plagiarize!? There is no author attribution so we don’t know the author… Many articles in media today are LLM generated (fully or partially), can I copy those if someone sticks there name as author?!

bottom line is - you didn’t do the work but copied it from elsewhere, you plagiarized it, period

mckirk 2 days ago

I'll just link here to another comment I made that sums up my argument quite well, I think:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246168