That's absolutely right. Why the downvotes? If OpenAI are using but not acknowledging the work of others that's plagiarism. If they don't know for sure, but aren't performing due dilligence to make sure they aren't, that's also plagiarism.
If I know person A is working on problem B.
I am free to work on problem B too. Why should person A be limited to working on it.
Also brain raping* is not illegal in most jurisdictions.
But they're both deeply disturbing.
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> Why the downvotes?
I think there was only ever one. Not sure why.
About the plagiarism issue, I model it as OpenAI being an advisor and their AI a PhD student. If the advisor puts their name on a paper behind that of their PhD and it turns out the PhD copied the text of the paper from somewhere else the advisor is also responsible of plagiarism, not just the student. The least the advisor can do is withdraw their authorship from the paper.
But, yeah, point well made: it could be much worse than that. Like an advisor instructing a student to copy someone else's paper.
Personally I don't like thinking of LLMs like a PhD student, because most PhD students remember where they learned things from, while LLMs essentially cannot. I think of it a bit more like someone using a search tool carelessly. Although in this case it is apparently more like deliberate misuse than carelessness.