Are we all plagiarists now?
economist.com
economist.com
- exact reuse of a long-ish word sequence(s) without credits -> not cool.
- complete/partial reinterpretation of an already existing story in different words -> it's fine
- Traced/almost identical image/drawing/painting (with the intent to fool someone) -> not cool
- Visual imitation in style/content but different approach or usage -> it's fine
I think people are too attached by the novelty of something, sure if I write a bunch of words and you repeat them as yours, that's not cool. But if something I make inspires someone and they take it, reframe it, rephrase it or whatever, go ahead.
People adore Star Wars, which is an absolute one to one of a hero's journey, it still has value. Most modern fantasy are basically fanfics of Middle Earth, still good that they exist.
Imagine someone just spamming sequences of notes at random for their whole life, does it mean they own anything else made here afterwards +70/80/90... Years?
If I restate something using completely my own words, I'm still supposed to cite the source where I got the idea.
If something is completely my own invention, and I didn't use any sources to create it, then that's original and I don't need to credit anyone else. But that's very rare.
Certainly there are styles and broad arcs that many creations follow that are not directly attributable to a specific source.
"I know this stuff, just trust me" isn't a valid citation. The point is to give anyone who reads the paper a way to a) verify that each fact you put in the paper has solid academic sourcing, and b) find more information about it if they wish.
If you know a lot of stuff about the topic already, that's great—but unless you've already written and published papers on the subject, you can't just cite yourself.
In the end hard lines are very hard.
Producing something entirely novel in an act of pure creativity is essentially a tall tale - like Newton and the Apple - possibly some truth to it, but definitely mythologized.
Yeah but A Hero's Journey is not a literal story, it's more of a framework written in a book called "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" for what makes a story interesting and how various original stories like myths, folklore etc (like the Bible) always followed the same pattern.
The author dissected that pattern, and then it has been followed by many writers/creators for what is considered to be a good model of a story. Screenwriting classes literally teach it, along with other stuff like The Three Act structure etc.
And if you really look into, almost all good stories follow that pattern to some extent, but it is the implementation that makes each story special.
It's like a bit like saying "People adore [x] webapp which is an absolute one to one of React, it still has value" but both are fundamentally different things.
Non transformative use -> Not cool.
Transformative -> it's fine
Original work attempting to deceive or confuse the origin as being by another. -> not cool
Original work emulating the style of another without attempting to imply involvement of the other -> it's fine.
For example, you can use a sample in a new song. And that new song can by copyrighted. But you still have to seek permission from the copyright holders of the sample to use it.
Fair use is the only time it’s legal to use another copyrighted piece without consent. And the rules for fair use vary from country to county.
Fair use is a defense, not a requirement - You don't need permission to claim fair use; it's a legal defense if you're sued Seeking permission can backfire - Copyright holders may deny permission even when fair use would apply, creating unnecessary barriers.
This is especially true for parody and commentary.
That’s not why I said.
> something like YouTube's automated copyright strikes might affect you. "Ask Forgiveness" is often a better option.
Now you’re talking about platform quirks rather than copyright law.
> Fair use is a defense, not a requirement
Actually “fair use” is defined by law in a lot of counties. It’s not a defence, it’s a legal right.
> You don't need permission to claim fair use;
That’s not what I said.
> it's a legal defense if you're sued Seeking permission can backfire
It’s spelt “defence” (with a C not an S) and the point is you seek permission before distribution, not after
Not everything in life follows the “ask for forgiveness not permission” rule ;)
> Copyright holders may deny permission even when fair use would apply, creating unnecessary barriers.
Copyright holders cannot deny fair use in jurisdictions where fair use laws apply.
I don't think you can say that AI-written can be reliably detected. Turnitin is only ~90% effective: https://teaching.temple.edu/sites/teaching/files/media/docum...
I mean, the solution is just in-class-only essays, right? Or to stop with the weird obsession with testing and just focus on actually teaching.
They failing exams because they don't do the work is on them.
The better way to use ai is to get it to teach you to write the essay better and faster each time so it remains your voice and starts with how you write already and develop it from there.
Everyone generally speaks and writes different enough like a gait. Ai erases that both directly and indirectly.
People who think they’re clever with ai but won’t spend time developing any actual skills will always get exposed eventually.
Colleges are introducing rules that if they can detect AI after you graduate they will cancel your degree. Fun watches on YouTube showing it.
Have fun!
The linked article breaks it down. The measured false positive rate is essentially 0 in this small study.
I know that's what they wrote, but I heavily disagree. It got 28/30 (93%) correct, but out of the two it got "wrong":
- one was just straight up not rated because the file format was odd or something
- the other got rated as 11% AI-written, which imo is very low. I think teachers would consider this as "human-written", as when I was being evaluated with Turnitin that percentage of "plagiarism" detected would have simply been ignored.
The linked article analyzes their data into more detail. In particular, the measured false positive rate is essentially 0 in this small study.
The false positive rate is 0. The tool *never* says human writing is AI.
That cannot be true as it would be easy for a human to write in the style of AI, if they choose to. Whoever is making that claim is lying, because money...
> That cannot be true as it would be easy for a human to write in the style of AI, if they choose to.
Is that the nightmare scenario that everybody in this thread is freaking out about?
Students who go to great effort to deliberately try to make it look like they are cheating, they're the ones you're afraid of being falsely accused of cheating?
We're on our way to dystopia because people who go out of their way to look suspicious on purpose, arouse suspicion?
It is very common in academic investigations to achieve results with more than 95% accuracy, let alone 90%, when in the real world the same AI tools fail miserably.
So, yes, this is the nightmare scenario that I am afraid of where a simplistic "investigation" will be used to justify the use of unproven AI tools with real life consequences to people.
This isn't zoolander math. or is it.
I’m surprised to see these comments in conjunction, 90% is pretty good, and much higher than i expected. I wonder what’s the breakdown of false positives/false negatives
Edit: from the linked paper
> Of the 90 samples in which AI was used, it correctly identified 77 of them as having >1% AI generated text, an 86% success rate. The fact that the tool is more accurate in identifying human-generated text than AI-generated text is by design. The company realized that users would be unwilling to use a tool that produced significant numbers of false positives, so they “tuned” the tool to give human writers the benefit of the doubt.
This all seems exceptionally reasonable. Of the samples with AI, they correctly identify 86%. Of the samples without AI, they correctly identify a higher proportion, because of the nature of their service. This implies that if they _wanted_ to make a more balanced AI detection tool, they could get that 86% somewhat higher.
Edit: thanks for doing so
What standard of proof is appropriate to expel someone from college? After they've taken on, say, $40,000 of debt to attend?
Assuming you had a class of 100 students, "90% effective" would mean expelling 10 students wrongly - personally I'd expect a higher standard of proof.
Anyone who gives 10 seconds of thought to how this could help realizes at 90% it’s a helpful first pass. Motivated students who really want to hide can probably squeak past more often than you’d like. And you know there will be false positives so you do something like: * review those more carefully, or send it to a TA if you have one to do so * keep track of patterns of positives from each student over time * explain to the student it got flagged, say it’s likely a false positive, and have them talk over the paper in person
I’m sure decent educators can figure out how to use a tool like that. The bad ones are going to cause stochastic headaches for their students regardless.
Tests can be wrong in two different ways, false positive, and false negative.
The 90% figure (which people keep rounding up from 86% for some reason, so I'll use that number from now on) is the sensitivity, or the abitity to not have false negatives. If there are 100 cheaters, the test will catch 86 of them, and 14 will get away with it.
The test's false positive rate, how often it says "AI" when there isn't any AI, is 0%, or equivalently, the test's "specificity" is 100%
> Turnitin correctly identified 28 of 30 samples in this category, or 93%. One sample was rated incorrectly as 11% AI-generated[8], and another sample was not able to be rated.
The worst that would have happened according to this test is that one student out of 30 would be suspected of AI generating a single sentence of their paper. None of the human authored essays were flagged as likely AI generated.
Of course, there's also the Chinese, who cheat because they are international students paying several multiples of the tuition and the university doesn't want to upset that gravy train in the wake of several federal funding cuts. Also because your rank-and-file Chinese students at most American colleges suck at speaking English so they, except in pure STEM, need to cheat in order to pass in the first place.
Problem with that at scale is those that might skirt by within that 10% might one day be your doctor, your lawyer, or your accountant and you'd never know until it bit you in the ass.
There are people whose style is closer to AI, that doesn't mean they used AI. And sometimes AI outputs text that look like a human would write.
There is also the mix: if I write two pages and I used two sentences by AI (because I was tired and I couldn't find the right sentence), I may be flagged for using AI. Even worse, if I ask AI for advice and then I rewrite it myself, what would be the output? I can make a reasoning that both (AI written and not AI written) would be wrong.
None of these tools are binary. They give a percentage score, a confidence score, or both.
If you include one ai sentence in a 100 sentence essay, your essay will be flagged as 1% AI and nobody will bat an eye.
Of course the sample size is fairly small, I would want a larger scale study to see if the false positive rate is actually 5%, or 1%, 0.1%, 0.000001%, etc.
Then if there's a high probability, I look through the references in the paper. Do they say what the student attributes to them?
Finally, if I still think it's AI-generated, I have the student in and ask questions about the paper. "You said this here in this paragraph -- what do you mean by that?"
AI detectors are a first-pass, but I think a human really needs to be in the loop to evaluate whether it's cheating, or just using something to clean up grammar and spelling.
In an educational context, the only purpose of the writing has traditionally been learning, and the purpose of turning it in has been to prove that the learning took place. Both of those are out the window now. Classroom discussion and oral presentations might be the only place you can still prove learning took place. Until everybody gets hidden AI-powered earpieces of course.
No it isn't. Stop.
The cynical part of me says that the people who share this link with that summary are the cheaters trying to avoid getting caught, on the basis of the fact that they are patently abusing the numbers presumably because they didn't pay attention in math class.
The tests are 90% SENSITIVE. That means that of 100 AI cheaters, 10 won't be caught.
The paper you linked says the tests are 100% SPECIFIC. That means they will *never* flag a human-written paper as mostly AI.
On some level the human output in academic setting is expected to be well formulaic in way AI generated text is.
Which often could lead to false positives.
Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.
What consideration do you choose to afford to those feelings?
Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.
I get that the purpose of IP laws are psychological, rather than moral. A culture where people feel as though they can personally benefit from their work is going to have higher technological and scientific output, which is certainly good, even if the means of producing that good are sort of artificial and selfish.
It's not hard to imagine, or maybe dream of, a world where the motivation for research and development is not just personal gain. But we have to work with the world we have, not the world we want, don't we...
Nobody will starve themselves, even if doing so will feed hundreds of others.
Neither. They are purely economic. You even acknowledge this when you call out personal benefit.
The stated intent is to facilitate creators realizing economic benefits from time spent creating. The reality is that large corporations end up rent seeking using our shared cultural artifacts. Both impacts are economic in nature.
The economic benefit is derived from a psychological effect: the expectation of personal gain.
The economy as a whole benefits from technological progress. The technological progress is fueled by each individual's expectation of personal gain. The personal gain is created via IP law.
There's a psychological component regarding trust. Either that your employer would never try to cheat you or alternatively that your employer is the sort that might try to cheat you but won't thanks to our society's various systems. But the showing up to work itself is a simple exchange of time and skill for money.
They don't. In this case democratizing the IP is more likely a social / economic benefit, not a harm.
We're talking about intellectual property rights, the benefits of which only go to the intellectual property holder.
Although how big a corporation has to be before we cross the line from social / economic harm to social / economic good is an interesting question.
Everything I write, every thought I have, and the output of my every creative endeavor is profoundly shaped by the work of others that I have ingested, compressed, and iterated on over the course of my lifetime, yet I have the audacity to call it my own. Any meager success I may have, I attribute to naught but my own ingenosity.
It is the humanness that is the difference, that which exists outside the abstraction of the imposed categories. The human cannot compete with the machine which ingests ALL works and renders the patterns easily available. The artist toiled to perfect those patterns, and now is no longer granted the decency of reaping the fruits of their labors. Humans can give, the machine can only take.
None of these changes came without losses. Writing eroded our capacity to remember, printing fueled decades of bloody religious conflict, photography harmed portrait artists, audio recordings wrecked social collaborative parlor music, computers fucked up our spelling & arithmetic, and the Internet... don't get me started.
Ultimately there is no going back, we will change and adapt to our new capabilities. Some will be harmed and some will be left behind. So turns the wheel of progress, I don't think anyone can stop it.
This isn't an answer, this is just incoherent, circular rambling.
We write open source software so everyone can learn and benefit from it. But why do we not like it when they are being trained on them and allow normies to use it as well?
We want news, knowledge and information to be spread everywhere. So why don't we share all of our books, articles and blogs openly to any AI companies that want to use them? We should all want to have our work to be used by everyone more easily.
Personally, I don't have any fundamental refutation to this. There's a sense that it is wrong. I can somewhat articulate why its wrong in term of control and incentives. But those are not well formed just yet.
I think the "wrongness" would go away, for me anyways, if we found a way that everyone was still remunerated in some way when this sharing occurred.
A lá, the vision of what crypto ought to have been: Every single thing created and shared has a .000xx cent value and as it makes it's way around being used/shared/iterated upon just sends those royalty checks to the "creator" always, forever.
If you are an employee, you get paid for building something (work), and the employer owns the thing that was built (work product). If you are self-employed, it's the other way around. You don't get paid for the work, but you own the work product. Employees generally don't work for free, and the self-employed generally don't give away their capital for free.
If you opt to "release it to the [world] in the spirit of openness and sharing," then you built capital for free and gave it away for free. If you didn't want others to capitalize on the capital, then why did you give it away?
If you want attribution, then either get paid for the work and add it to your resume, or exchange your work product for attribution (e.g., let people visit the Jryio Museum, build a Jryio brand, become known in your community as a creative leader, etc.). If you give it away for free, then your expectations should include the possibility that people will take it for free.
Look how much power lies in the hands of people who lie between petroleum in the ground and its combustion. It's a whole waterfall and the majority of the "wealth" in society seems to consist of people who're spinning their wheels from siphoning from it. And now they're terrified it'll go away.
The AI "gold rush" really has this feeling. "How can I get my finger in the pie somewhere here?"
"All that is solid melts into air"
Given the performance of open weight models to date it looks as though that might prove fairly difficult in the medium to long term.
Take away copyright and distributors no longer compete with each other on the basis of their catalogs — all of them have access to all works, and they're left to compete on network effects, verticals, and locking consumers in to specific distribution channels. Creators have no role in that economy because they have nothing they can leverage.
In fiction, taking ideas (hero's journey, middle earth, etc)[1] and adapting to a new story/characters is totally fine without attribution. There's probably only like 5 stories ever that just keep getting re-written this way.
But in non-fiction, academic research and the like, stealing ideas without attribution is a problem, because ideas are the whole point. Nobody reads a research paper for the plot.
But in school, and especially with non-fiction, we're so often told to "just re-word it to make it your own" which is actually the most insidious form of plagiarism. If I get an idea from you and want to include that in my paper, that's great, but I have to give you credit. Great non-fiction books I've read are riddled with citations and have 100-page bibliographies. The value of the book/paper is (often) in the synthesis of those ideas into something new, with maybe it's own ideas added on top. But "re-wording" does not make and idea your own, and does not escape a charge of plagarism.
[1] top comment as of this writing
I think you might be confused, or had unclear teachers.
You're told to re-word it but still cite it. There are different combinations here:
1. Copy verbatim, no quotes, cite. Plagiarism, because you're copying the wording without quoting (even though you're citing).
2. Copy verbatim, quote, cite. Correct.
3. Paraphrase, no quotes, cite. Correct.
4. Paraphrase, no quotes, don't cite. Plagiarism if not "common knowledge".
Teachers should be telling you to do 3 rather than 1. You are maybe confusing 3 with 4, thinking they were telling you to do 4? (Or your teachers were just wrong?)
But the difference between 3 and 4 can actually get legitimately confusing in certain cases, even for academics, because there are a lot of ideas that are just "in the air" and it's not always clear if something is "common knowledge" or if there's some original citation for it somewhere.
The so-called "tech" company, flawed hero?
It does not produce content, only intermediates access to it
Now it can produce content
But to create a system to do produce content, "Generative AI", the so-called "tech" companies needed to use copyrighted material on massive scale without a license
Was that use infringing. The courts will decide
The intermediary (middleman) companies no longer need longer need "user-generated content" to attract an audience
Of course they will still intermediate and collect data from and conduct surveillance on anyone that uses their software, which generally they can use for any purpose
> ...
> Moreover, using ChatGPT, Mr Kreuz argues, does not make you a plagiarist, since it is not cribbing from a single “original” text. He suggests LLMs are doing unacknowledged “ghostwriting”. To many that is too generous: this is still plagiarism, but with an AI accomplice.
Meanwhile, the site itself offers AI-powered narration for the article. The AI voice's vocal characteristics had to come from somewhere. Is it any different for prosody than for prose?
I don't think so.
Genres are too vague and generic to be ownable by anybody. Inspiration is not plagiarism.
-- me
Most of us here probably agree that A is not really a problem, but where people stand on issue B is where the value divide comes from.
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste…
Ummm, excuse me. This is literally the garden of Eden. In fact this idiot plagiarizes the name too. He actually calls this Eden. wtf. Fake as fuck. And people call this copy-paste artist who cites literally zero of his sources a “poet”.
Every generation throughout time has had the right to recreate the legacy of human thought through the filter of their own times.
“Cultural appropriation” and other knock off terms are objectively a part of every creative and functional cycle.
Give credit where credit is due, yet once let into the world a thought becomes a part of such wilds.
Not to mention that when it comes to art, I'd rather consume something that someone deemed important and interesting enough to dedicate skill and time to.
Art is not just about the thing produced, stripped of its context and significance, and forced to be interpreted by ignorant minds who, in their ignorance, consider themselves capable of deriving meaning of value out of words and pictures they can scarcely comprehend from their own limited perspective.
The significance of all art is derived from its historical context, the authors implicit intentions and mode of creation, and the unique experience generated from an individual consuming the art. If you suggest only the consumers experience matters, then you are free to forgo the greater appreciation of art in favor of the lessened experience of it if you wish. For greater awareness and understanding of the details of the parts allow us to better understand the significance of the whole. Only art that is of little value is lessened by our deepened understanding of it.
The problem is a system of strong copyright laws isn't going to fix this system, and from everything we've seen is making it worse.
Demands? Almost everything we do? I only spend 40-50 hours a week max doing labor that anybody would reasonably describe as being commercially exploited. No one’s broken down my door demanding I start making money on the visual novel I’m drafting in Ren’Py on the weekends, nor have I been castigated by my peers for throwing a party without charging an entrance fee.
Far from a universal experience though. People who rely on art to survive right now. People who don't have the energy to do more "productive" work on weekends. And those that work weekends to survive because they don't make a living wage.
As would I, and we are welcome to. That doesn’t mean alternatives must be eliminated.
I agree with you that the ultimate issue is the surrounding capitalist system. But that means solutions need to address the actual problem, the system, and not the symptom, the technology.
And everything wasn't "content", nor did they have massive numbers of influencers and public content creators, nor was there was a push even for laymen to churn heaps of text every day or to project an image to the whole world.
And until recently if you got caught plagiarizing you were shamed or even fired from journalism. Now it's just business as usual...
You'd think it was more complicated than that if the people who were doing a caricature of you had enslaved and murdered your family, and lived in the house your family built while you lived on the street.
It doesn't matter, because culture works how it works (and is often used as a political tool), and somehow world culture ends up being people pretending to be Americans pretending to be the descendants of American slaves. But it's undeniably ugly.
It's an understandable position for these reasons:
- We like art and we ant to show our support and appreciation for art
- The most straightforward way to show support and appreciation for art is to give the artist money
- Much of the art we appreciate was only possible due to the promise of monetary gain on the part of the artist
But there are some old, unavoidable questions:
- At what point does the pursuit of monetary gain begin to diminish one's own artistic expression?
- At what point does the pursuit of monetary gain begin to diminish other peoples' artistic expression?
As you point out, there is no art without appropriation and re-creation.
And now there are some new, unavoidable facts:
- Appropriation is becoming easier
- Attribution is therefore becoming more difficult
- Compensation is therefore becoming more difficult
- Rewinding the clock is impossible
The only way out of this would be for humanity to collectively take a puritanical stance on art, where any form of appropriation is demonized. I think this would make art suck.
my deck BBQ caught on fire, problem .. versus ... the 35,000 hectares next to my house is on fire with 20 meter tall flames
is "appropriation" now "easier" ? for whom, at what scale to deliver? at what scale to ingest ?
but it is quite notorious that people don't actually like doing that point, especially, I just have to point it out here, on HN. So...
At what point does the inability of monetary gain begin to diminish artistic expression?
Cultural appropriation was a term popularised in the heady days of woke excesses when white liberals were desperate to find reasons to be mad at one another for perceived impurity. It's a ludicrous concept from top to bottom.
Intellectual property laws, in my opinion, have a place in our society.