Comment by whatshisface
3 days ago
They key difference between plagarism and building on someone's work is whether you say, "this based on code by linsey at github.com/socialnorms" or "here, let me write that for you."
3 days ago
They key difference between plagarism and building on someone's work is whether you say, "this based on code by linsey at github.com/socialnorms" or "here, let me write that for you."
but as mlinsey suggests, what if it's influenced in small, indirect ways by 1000 different people, kind of like the way every 'original' idea from trained professionals is? There's a spectrum, and it's inaccurate to claim that Claude's responses are comparable to adapting one individual's work for another use case - that's not how LLMs operate on open-ended tasks, although they can be instructed to do that and produce reasonable-looking output.
Programmers are not expected to add an addendum to every file listing all the books, articles, and conversations they've had that have influenced the particular code solution. LLMs are trained on far more sources that influence their code suggestions, but it seems like we actually want a higher standard of attribution because they (arguably) are incapable of original thought.
It's not uncommon, in a well-written code base, to see documentation on different functions or algorithms with where they came from.
This isn't just giving credit; it's valuable documentation.
If you're later looking at this function and find a bug or want to modify it, the original source might not have the bug, might have already fixed it, or might have additional functionality that is useful when you copy it to a third location that wasn't necessary in the first copy.
This is why I'm still, even after decades of seeing it fail in the marketplace, a fan of literate programming.
If the problem you ask it to solve has only one or a few examples, or if there are many cases of people copy pasting the solution, LLMs can and will produce code that would be called plagiarism if a human did it.
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Do you have a source for that being the key difference? Where did you learn your words, I don’t see the names of your teachers cited here. The English language has existed a while, why aren’t you giving a citation every time you use a word that already exists in a lexicon somewhere? We have a name for people who don’t coin their own words for everything and rip off the words that other painstakingly evolved over a millennia of history. Find your own graphemes.
What a profoundly bad faith argument. We all understand that singular words are public domain, they belong to everyone. Yet when you arrange them in a specific pattern, of which there are infinite possibilities, you create something unique. When someone copies that arrangement wholesale and claims they were the first, that’s what we refer to as plagiarism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9huNI5sBd8
It’s not bad faith argument. It’s an attempt to shake thinking that is profoundly stuck by taking that thinking to an absurd extreme. Until that’s done, quite a few people aren’t able to see past the assumptions they don’t know they making. And by quite a few people I mean everyone, at different times. A strong appreciation for the absurd will keep a person’s thinking much sharper.
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It is possible that the concept of intellectual property could be classified as a mistake of our era by the history teachers of future generations.
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This particular user does that all the time. It's really tiresome.
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