Hacker News Reader

Comment by result2vino | Hacker News Reader

Yes. It’s clearly plagiarism. Your reply is clearly grasping at the furthest of straws in an attempt to be contrarian and add another “stochastic parrot hehe!” comment to the already overflowing pile. Line up 100 people and the only ones agreeing with you are other wannabe contrarians.

View on HN

I truly don't understand the tone of your comment.

I'm not grasping at the furthest of straws, I see a distinction between 'verbatim copying someone else's work' and 'verbatim copying the results of a tool that produces text'.

the tool actually produces text… of someone else’s work… that you then copy… verbatim… :)

But the text itself is not someone else's work verbatim.

A translation tool like DeepL is presumably trained on a huge amount of 'other people's work'. Is copying its result verbatim into your own work also plagiarism then?

plagiarism - by definition - is copying someone else’s work.

the easier definition is “did YOU write this?” if answer is no - you plagiarised it and should be punished to the full extent.

'Someone else's work' -- exactly. Not 'the output of some tool'.

I'm not saying what the guy did wasn't wrong or dumb, I'm saying: Plagiarism has a strict definition, and I don't think it can be applied to the case of directly copying the output of an LLM -- because plagiarism refers to copying the work of another author, and I don't think LLMs are generally regarded (so far) as being able to have this kind of 'authorhood'.

plagiarism does NOT refer to copying the work of another author, it refers to you submitting work as yours that you didn’t yourself write.

if I copy entire article from the Economist, did I plagiarize!? There is no author attribution so we don’t know the author… Many articles in media today are LLM generated (fully or partially), can I copy those if someone sticks there name as author?!

bottom line is - you didn’t do the work but copied it from elsewhere, you plagiarized it, period

I'll just link here to another comment I made that sums up my argument quite well, I think:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246168

> A translation tool like DeepL is presumably trained on a huge amount of 'other people's work'. Is copying its result verbatim into your own work also plagiarism then?

Yes, if you present yourself as its author.

So let's say you are not a native English speaker and write a passage of your paper in your native language, then let DeepL translate this and paste the result into your paper, without a note or citation. Is that plagiarism?

Plagerism isn’t the copying part, it’s the part where you claim to be the author of something you are not the author of. Hope that helps to clear up things. You can plagerism content that your are both legally and ethically allowed to copy. It doesn’t matter the least bit. If you claim to be the author of content you didn’t author and lack attribution AI or otherwise then you’re plagering the content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com