Hacker News Reader

Comment by nmfisher | Hacker News Reader

There's a difference between "this is allowed under their ToS" and "it is academically unethical to fail to credit the people whose specific conversations were fed into a model that was used to solve a problem".

I don't think these people would be so miffed if they had been properly credited - that's how academia works (at least, that's my understanding of it).

View on HN

Whoa that's a slippery slope! Next you'll want model runners to cite the data their models were trained on

In fact we should though.

I suspect the fundamental problem here is it's hard (if not impossible) to determine if someone who tried the winning approach deserves the credit for the discovery, because there's always the chance that they could've done something differently, or stopped before finishing, and thus never actually made the discovery. They might've even tried the approach just based on a whim, without really thinking it would work, and might've given up without a final insight. And fundings run out, people end up in hospitals, etc. What do you credit them with when the work isn't finished? For trying an approach that sounded promising? You can do that I guess, but is that what they want?

But who gets credit then? Every mathematician who's work was read by an LLM during training? By that logic, we should put every published mathematician's name on the authorship of this paper. Sure, this guy should be higher up the list, but everyone's name should be on it by standard academic convention.

But this gets back to the original "who owns the LLM output" and "can you train models on the internet" argument that's been raging for years.

Does every mathematician get cited in every maths paper? I think it's pretty clear who should be cited.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com