Comment by hnfong
11 days ago
Why is "plagiarism" "bad"?
Modern society seems to assume any work by a person is due to that person alone, and credits that person only. But we know that is not the case. Any work by an author is the culmination of a series of contributions, perhaps not to the work directly, but often to the author, giving them the proper background and environment to do the work. The author is simply one that built upon the aggregate knowledge in the world and added a small bit of their own ideas.
I think it is bad taste to pass another's work as your own, and I believe people should be economically compensated for creating art and generating ideas, but I do not believe people are entitled to claim any "ownership" of ideas. IMHO, it is grossly egoistic.
Sure, you can't claim ownership of ideas, but if you verbatim repeat other people's content as if it is your own, and are unable to attribute it to its original creator, is that not a bit shitty? That's what LLMs are doing
If a human learns to code by reading other people's code, and then writes their own new code, should they have to attribute all the code they ever read?
Plagiarism is a concept from academia because in academia you rise through the ranks by publishing papers and getting citations. Using someone else's work but not citing them breaks that system.
The real world doesn't work like that: your value to the world is how much you improve it. It would not help the world if everyone were forced to account for all the shoulders they have stood on like academics do. Rather, it's sufficient to merely attribute your most substantial influences and leave it at that.
If a human copies someone else's code verbatim, they should attribute the source, yes. If they learn from it and write original code, no, they don't have to cite every single piece of code they've ever read
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