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Comment by scraptor | Hacker News Reader

Plagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it. If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.

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> Plagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it. If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.

If you draw a Venn Diagram of plagiarism and copyright violations, there's a big intersection. For example: if I take your paper, scratch off your name, make some minor tweaks, and submit it; I'm guilty of both plagiarism and copyright violation.

Please argue in good faith. A new research paper is obviously materially different from "rearranging that text to create a marginally new text".

The comment is responding to this line:

> If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism.

That is a specific claim that is being directly addressed and pretty clearly qualifies as "good faith".

"Rearranging text" is not what modern LLMs do though, unless you specifically ask them to.

I didn't make this claim. Feel free to bring a cogent argument to a commenter who did.

>I didn't make this claim

???

Did you not literally comment the following?

>A new research paper is obviously materially different from "rearranging that text to create a marginally new text".

What did you mean by that, if that's not your claim?

I made that comment, but the bit in quotes is not my claim. I was quoting a grandparent post. If you read from the top, the quotation marks and general flow of the thread should make this clear.

Having actually done research and published scientific papers, the key limitation is experimentation. Review papers are useful, and AI is useful, but creating new knowledge is more useful. I haven't had much luck using LLMs to extrapolate well beyond their knowledge domain.

I certainly don't see much value in AI generated papers myself, I just object to the claim that the mere act of reading a large number of existing papers before writing yours is inherently plagiarism.

Only when those papers are referenced

You were supposed to keep reading past the first sentence, instead of trying to refute the first thing you saw that you found disagreeable. By doing so, you missed the point that plagiarism is substantively different from copyright infringement.

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