alt Hacker NewsBecause plagiarization is not illegal. It’s just unethical and dishonest, and in certain contexts where your work is directly related to your status or compensation, it gets you in trouble. Copyright violation is a specific type of plagiarism that is illegal, but LLM output is not and, in current legal understanding, can not be copyrighted.
Using the services of a human editor is not plagiarism, and mere editing is not considered coauthorship. Mentioning or thanking the editor is just a courtesy, or a contractual obligation at most. LLMs don’t need thanks so most people probably agree it’s fine not to mention it in a casual blog post if its part really is just editorial, brainstorming aid, or similar. (But context-specific terms and conditions apply, obviously.)
What is absolutely not editorial use is making a hundred-word prompt and asking an LLM to expand it to a thousand-word blog post, or a thousand-line computer program, just like it wouldn’t be to ask or pay another human to do it for you. At most you’re then a coauthor of the LLM. This should be obvious, really, we have literally hundreds of years of history on the ethics and norms of assigning authorship on creative works. LLMs should change very little of that.
And then there’s the quality issue. If there were a human author that ghost-wrote blog posts or program code for people, and their output would always have the same known quality and accuracy issues, I’d want to be warned rather than having to spend time on figuring it out every time. Reputation matters.
Your arguments aren't convincing. LLMs do not have authorship, they aren't persons. These ramblings about plagiarism are irrelevant, they're a classic case of "topic missed."
The same for human editors, about whom I have slightly more nuanced view. I do believe that some of them are offering services that amount to ghostwriting and are often unethical. I've seen people make careers in the humanities where I'd say the paid editor (who also had studied the subject area) would at least be a co-author, if not the person who in the end deserved most of the credit. I've seen that with my own eyes as someone who worked for 20 years as a researcher in academia. That's why I've always rejected private editors that many of my colleagues have employed. It's a deeply unethical practice, not at all as harmless as you describe it.
That being said, the comparison to editors also doesn't apply because, again, LLMs aren't persons and do not have authorship. They neither are persons and authors in a legal sense, nor does it makes much sense from an ethical perspective to grant them personhood and authorship. If that made sense, then I'd agree with you that they should be mentioned as co-authors or authors. I'd have no problem whatsoever with academic and other works written by LLMs and giving credit to them. However, I don't see we're there yet.
Regarding the quality issue: What I'm saying and what my stance is is exactly that the works of persons or LLMs or persons who use LLMs for writing code or texts must and should always be evaluated the same, namely based on the merits of the content alone. That would be even more important if LLMs were persons and could be attributed authorship -- but they can't.
You arguments don't work because they're based on incorrect assumptions about what LLMs are. They are tools. You might find it dishonest when people use them without stating that, and that's fine, but then you shouldn't base your views on unrelated issues like plagiarism, copyright, and editors. My hunch is that people like you simply can't cope with the change, and, again, I'm saying that as someone who barely uses AI for programming and has never and will never use it for writing. Please stop the whining. I'll be honest, to me personally, these anti-AI rants are intellectually insulting because they seem to imply that humans cannot stand against AI by the quality of their own works and require some extra protectionism.