> What I am objecting to is the "another person's" part.
Fair enough. We disagree about definitions here. To me, plagiarizing is claiming authorship of a work that you did not author. Where that work came from is irrelevant to the question.
> If not, whatif you use an LLM to do the translation instead, instructing it to act strictly as a 'translation tool'?
Translation is an entirely different beast, though. A translation is not claiming to be original authorship. It is transparently the opposite of that. Nobody translating a work would claim that they wrote that work.
> Fair enough. We disagree about definitions here. To me, plagiarizing is claiming authorship of a work that you did not author. Where that work came from is irrelevant to the question.
This is exactly what it is ... the post is taking "another person's" waaaay to literally - especially given that we are in the year of our Lord 2024/2025. One of the author's comments above is also discarding Encyclopedia argument stating that they are written by people which cannot ever be factually proven (I can easily ask LLM to create an Encyclopedia and publish it). Who is "another person" on a Wikipedia page?! "bunch of people" ... how is LLM trained? "bunch of people, bunch of facts, bunch of ____"
The crux of this whole "argument" isn't that plagiarism is "another person's work" it is that you are passing work as YOURS that isn't YOURS - it is that simple.
Well, I understand, and I suspect that a lot of people commenting here see the term similarly to you; but there's an official definition regardless of your personal interpretation, and it does include the 'somebody else's work' part.
Why is translation a different beast? It produces text based on a prompt you give it, and it draws from vast amounts of the works of other people to do so. So if a translation tool does not change the 'authorship' of the underlying text (i.e., if it would have been plagiarism to copy the text verbatim before translating it, it would be plagiarism after; and the same for the inverse), then it should also be possible for an LLM to not change the authorship between prompt and output. Which means, copying the output of an LLM verbatim is not necessarily in itself plagiarism.
> but there's an official definition regardless of your personal interpretation, and it does include the 'somebody else's work' part.
No, it doesn't. First of all, dictionaries aren't prescriptive and so all quoting a definition does is clarify what you mean by a word. That can be helpful toward understanding, of course.
That said, the intransitive verb form of the word does not require "somebody else's work" in the sense of that "someone else" being a human.
> to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
According to this, what it means is taking credit for a work you did not produce. That work did not have to be produced by a human, it merely had to exist.
> Why is translation a different beast?
Because it doesn't produce a new work, it just changes the language that work is expressed in. "Moby Dick" is "Moby Dick" regardless of what language it has been translated to. This is why the translator (human or otherwise) does not become the author of the work. If you were to run someone else's novel through a translator and claimed you wrote that work, you would in every respect be committing plagiarism both by the plain meaning of the word and legally.
> copying the output of an LLM verbatim is not necessarily in itself plagiarism.
Yes, it is. You would be taking credit for something you did not author. You would be doing the same if you took credit for a translation of someone else's work.