By your argument, since an encyclopedia is not a person, I can copy it with impunity. It's a collection of work built on others' ideas and research, but technically a tool to bring it together. I can assure you that virtually any school would consider the direct use of it, without citation, plagiarism.
Let's assume I used an encyclopedia outside of my native tongue. I took the passage verbatim, used a tool to translate it to my native tongue, and passed it off as my own. The translation tool is clearly not a person, and I've even transformed the original work. I might escape detection, but this is still plagiarism.
Do you not agree?
Let's go to how Cambridge University defines it academically:
> Plagiarism is defined as the unacknowledged use of the work of others as if this were your own original work.
> A student may be found guilty of an act of plagiarism irrespective of intent to deceive.
And let's go to their specific citation for the use of AI in research:
> AI does not meet the Cambridge requirements for authorship, given the need for accountability. AI and LLM tools may not be listed as an author on any scholarly work published by Cambridge
> By your argument, since an encyclopedia is not a person, I can copy it with impunity.
I don’t see where they said (or implied) that.
How does “that isn’t plagiarism” imply “I can copy it with impunity”? Copyright infringement is still a thing.
Have you conflated plagiarism with copyright infringement? Neither implies the other. You can plagiarize without committing copyright infringement, and you can violate copyright without plagiarism.
I'm sorry, but this encyclopedia analogy really doesn't say anything at all about the argument I raised. An encyclopedia is the work of individual authors, who compiled the individual facts. It is not a tool that produces text based entirely on the prompt you give it. Using an encyclopedia's entries (translation or not) without citing the source is plagiarism, but that doesn't have any parallel to using an LLM.
(Also, the last quote you included seems to directly support my argument)
The translation software isn't a person. It will necessarily take liberty with the source material, possibly even in a non-deterministic fashion, to translate it. Why would it be any different from a LLM as a tool in our definition of plagiarism?
If I used a Markov Chain (arguably a very early predecessor to today's models) trained on relevant data to write the passage, would that be any different? What about a RNN? What would you qualify as the threshold we need to cross for the tool to not be to be plagiarism?
when did he imply that a LLM would be different as a tool than a translator in his definition of plagiarism? are you even understanding his points lmao?