alt Hacker NewsThe other day I was working with some shaders GLSL signed distance field functions. I asked Claude to review the code and it immediately offered to replace some functions with "known solutions". Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work.
His work is available with a permissible license on the Internet but somehow it doesn't seem right that a tool will just regurgitate someone else's work without any mention of copyright or license or original authorship.
Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own. Disgusting.
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Yeah, I find this super rude - in this example, the author distributed the code under a very permissive license, basically just wanting you to cite him as an author.
BAM, the LLM just strips all that out, basically pretending it just conjured an elegant solution from the thin air.
No wonder some people started calling the current generation of "AI" plagiarism machines - it really seems more fitting by the day.
LLMs have already told you these are "known solutions", which implicitly means they are established, non-original approaches. So the key point is really on the user side—if you simply ask one more question, like where these "known solutions" come from, the LLM will likely tell you that these formulas are attributed to Inigo Quilez.
So in my view, if you treat an LLM as a tool for retrieving knowledge or solutions, there isn't really a problem here. And honestly, the line between "knowledge" and "creation" can be quite blurry. For example, when you use Newton's Second Law (F = ma), you don't explicitly state that it comes from Isaac Newton every time—but that doesn't mean you're not respecting his contribution.
> Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own
These don't contradict each other though, you could "blatantly plagiarize someone else work" before as well. LLMs just add another layer in between.
> Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work.
Are they? A lot of these were used by people >20 years before Inigo wrote his blog posts. I wrote RenderMan shaders for VFX in the 90's professionally; you think about the problem, you "discover" (?) the math.
So they were known because they were known (a lot of them are also trivial).
Inio's main credit is for cataloging them, especially the 3D ones, and making this knowledge available in one place, excellently presented.
And of course, Shadertoy and the community and giving this knowledge a stage to play out in that way. I would say no one deserves more credit for getting people hooked on shader writing and proceduralism in rendering than this man.
But I would not feel bad about the math being regurgiated by an LLM.
There were very few people writing shaders (mostly for VFX, in RenderMan SL) in the 90's and after.
So apart from the "Texturing and Modeling -- A Procedural Approach" book, the "The RenderMan Companion" and "Advanced RenderMan", there was no literature. The GPU Gems series closed some gaps in later years.
The RenderMan Repository website was what had shader source and all pattern stuff was implict (what we call 2D SDFs today) beause of the REYES architecture of the renderers.
But knowledge about using SDFs in shaders mostly lived in people's heads. Whoever would write about it online would thus get quoted by an LLM.