Comment by palmotea
2 months ago
> It's unethical (if not outright fraudulent) to publish LLM work as if it were your own.
I disagree on that. It's really a gray area.
If it's some lazy vibecoded shit, I think what you say totally applies.
If the human did the thinking, gave the agent detailed instructions, and/or carefully reviewed the output, then I don't think it's so clear cut.
And full disclosure, I'm reacting more to copilot here, which lists itself as the author and you as the co-author. I'm not giving credit to the machine, like I'm some appendage to it (which is totally what the powers-that-be want me to become).
> Claude setting itself as coauthor is a good way to address this problem, and it doing so by default is a very good thing.
I do agree that's a sensible default.
Telling someone you did something that you actually didn't do isn't a gray area, it's a lie.
Using AI tools to code and then hiding that is unethical imo.
> Telling someone you did something that you actually didn't do isn't a gray area, it's a lie.
Pre-LLMs, various helper tools (including LSPs), would make code changes to improve the quality of the code - from simple things like adding a const specifier to a function, to changing the actual function being called.
No one insisted that the commit shouldn't have the human's name on it.
I guess that was a lie, too. Though it was more tolerated and accepted per our norms as a society. Though I do see the gray area now too.
The gray area is in the gap of "how much" help is given. Does a tool that does most of the coding, thinking and implementation for you still count as your work if you gave it the goal, guidance and architecture? Yes. And what I want to know as the peer of the person using such a tool, call it AI, is to what degree it did the work and how much of it you validated.
Since the other tools pre-AI were more validated by the humans using them, I as the peer know the outputs pass a basic level of quality. I know the human was mostly involved in their production and creation. AI breaks this assumption and now many humans are producing outputs that require an unpredictable level of review by peers - as this is a big change in the norms of our society, I think its OK to call it out as a requirement to label output as AI-assisted/generated and/or to specify how much and how AI was involved and call it unethical if not done so. (I think it's not necessary or helpful to call out the use of the pre-AI era tools as unethical or a lie, even though they are too).
These are not anywhere near equivalent. The fact that you think they are is laughable.
> It's really a gray area.
Yes, it really depends on how much work the agent did produce. It could be as little as doing a renaming or a refactoring, or execute direct orders that require no creativity or problem solving. In which case the agent shouldn't be credited more than the linter or the IDE.