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Comment by jedbrown | Hacker News Reader

Yes. The cognitive process performed by a person using an LLM is often no different from that performed by a person using a ghost author, which is a form of plagiarism covered by 42 CFR § 93.234 - Research misconduct.

Plagiarism, at its most fundamental level, is a lie. It is the taking of works or ideas of others and passing them off as your own, either directly or indirectly. The misdeed itself is in the lie, the “I created this” when it is known to be untrue.

However, that lie isn’t being told to the original victim. It’s a lie about the victim, claiming that they didn’t create it or their contributions didn’t matter, but it’s not a lie to them. Instead, it’s a lie to the audience, which is the second victim and the actual target of the con.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2019/08/01/the-two-victims-o...

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This is a very good definition, but today people will just claim the AI is not a victim, and pass this argument off to the legal cases the labs are already having in court wrt fair use. It's sad, but this is the argument people have made to themselves.

The ‘real author’ isn’t the only injured party.

Copying from a book with a long dead author, or paying a willing confederate to write your thesis for you, is still plagiarism.

In academic settings, it’s also plagiarism to copy your own previous work. Given that, I’m not sure academia gets to take the high ground on what constitutes misconduct or not wrt to plagiarism, at least in the edge cases.

It's often denoted plagiarism or self plagiarism as a short cut. While it's probably better denoted duplicate publication (or similar) it still constitutes a similar academic misconduct, because you're pretending something is novel without it being novel

As a side note quite often it can actually be literal plagiarism as well, many journals require you to assign copyright, so using that work without attribution is plagiarism.

The status of the true author is kind of irrelevant to whether it’s plagiarism or not. The true author may even be an active participant in the conspiracy.

But the public is still made a victim by being deceived about the authorship and hence the value and reliability of the work.

The right response then perhaps would be to correctly assign AI the authorship it deserves instead of the human "operator/patron" who did not understand what the AI wrought, but merely acted as benefactor to provide the token fee.

A paper should stand and fall on its merits; does it build constructively on our collective understanding? Does it advance the state of the art in its field? Does it shed new light on a prior mystery?

So it seems there ought to be a path whereby a quality non-human paper ought to be considered for submission, provided it is adequately and correctly attributed.

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