Comment by fc417fc802
14 hours ago
There are actually a surprising (IMO) number of career researchers on this site. Regardless, disregarding the context specific meaning will at absolute best result in a disjointed conversation where people are talking past each other. Worse, in this instance people are debating how arxiv (and other venues) ought to handle these sorts of things at which point you are well and truly into the territory where you need to get the field specific terminology right.
I concede that I was sloppy when I referred to what the researchers would be imagining. I should have phrased it as asking them if they thought that transgression X constituted fraud.
Regardless, hopefully you can see the idea that I was attempting to communicate? The burglary example isn't equivalent because while the spoons are unexpected the end result is still an event that most people would agree constituted burglary and resulted in noticeable harm to the victim.
I'm struggling to adjust your example on the fly but perhaps if it were the contents of the yard waste bin that had been pilfered? That's still technically burglary but I think most people would view it quite differently and might question the wisdom of prosecuting it.
I think the key difference here comes down to motivations as well as impact. Falsifying results (for example) is an active attempt to counterfeit the core value proposition of the endeavor and the end result of that is proportional - personal benefit directly as a result of the falsification and significant damages to anyone sufficiently bamboozled by the fiction long enough to base any decisions on it. Whereas no one using an LLM to generate just the bibliography is doing that to get ahead (at least not on its own) and any damages are limited to the reader wasting a few minutes trying to figure out the extent of the issue and who to contact about it.
> I should have phrased it as asking them if they thought that transgression X constituted fraud.
I'm not sure you're right that they wouldn't think it's fraud at first glance, but I also think it's the wrong test. Words have meanings that result in an actual truth to the matter that is sometimes non-obvious.
A theorem isn't false just because it intuitively seems false until you spend decades trying to prove it and finally find the proof. Requiring people be cleanshaven isn't obviously discriminatory, until someone points out the existence and prevalence of pseudofolliculitis barbae and perhaps that an action being discriminatory doesn't actually require intent.
So I'd propose the correct test (and again, this would only be for a discussion in an academic context, which this is not) looks something like giving them access to the common dictionary definitions, and legal definitions, of fraud, and then asking them to define it. Then taking their definition and applying it to the facts at hand.
I don't think your average academic thinks academia has a special meaning of the word. I think they would simply acknowledge the dictionary definition as the correct one, and as a result I think this is plainly fraud even as the word is used in an academic context.
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I don't think anyone defines fraud as only deception relating to the core value proposition of the instrument of the deception.