7 ms·

Are we all plagiarists now?

• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• geist67 9mo ago
  You’ve all been very silly with the idea of intellectual properties, copyright specifically. 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.
  • _cenw 9mo ago
    The problem is really that we live in a system that demands we find commercially exploitable value in almost everything we do. If my main strategy for that involved a skill that generative AI could perfectly copy, including my style by invoking my name, I'd be pissed too. 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.
    • iammjm 9mo ago
      When it comes to art, I'd rather consume something that is interesting/meaningful/beautiful/revolutionary/etc. It's all about the thing itself; it has always been. Less ego in all of this could actually be a good thing.
      • _cenw 9mo ago
        I don't think I disagree strongly. But I also don't think generative AI tools will do that just based on how they're built. Everything they can do, someone probably did better from scratch.
      • mistrial9 9mo ago
        my point of view changed when I had to step over dying people to get into my new studio space --some famous artist
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      • bombdailer 9mo ago
        Every artist of worth has sought two things: to bring something of beauty into the world, and to be regarded in their worth in proportion to the greatness of their art. You suggest we take from them the beauty they have brought forth, and leave them with nothing in return but scorn. What then has the artist to gain from their endeavors, when not only are they the be ridden of the significance of their authorship, but that then their works are to be put to use to feed the all consuming machine which benefits not the artist but those running the machine? 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.
    • zozbot234 9mo ago
      There's plenty of commercially exploitable value in knowing that something was hand-crafted or even just endorsed by someone famous and impressive, and is not just a second-rate, mass-market knockoff. AI doesn't change that in any way. If it means that celebrated artists can now create even better art on an even broader scale, that's a commercial win for them. Plagiarism would not be an issue at all.
    • pixl97 9mo ago
      >The problem is really that we live in a system that demands... 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.
      • _cenw 9mo ago
        Well, we're already seeing very asymmetric enforcement. Systems surrounding capitalism tend to bend in favor of those who already benefit from it.
    • derektank 9mo ago
      >The problem is really that we live in a system that demands we find commercially exploitable value in almost everything we do. 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.
      • _cenw 9mo ago
        Good for you, genuinely! 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.
    • dfxm12 9mo ago
      On top of this, Tech Bros want to capitalize on your talent like white bands covering Black artists during segregation.
    • NeutralCrane 9mo ago
      > 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. 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.
  • coldtea 9mo ago
    Every generation throughout time didn't have to compete with massive instant access to everything ever written to facilitate plagiarism, or with AI generated slop... 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...
  • pessimizer 9mo ago
    > “Cultural appropriation” and other knock off terms are objectively a part of every creative and functional cycle. 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.
  • adityamwagh 9mo ago
    This account was created one hour we should ignore this comment. :)
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  • MetaWhirledPeas 9mo ago
    There's a forced reframing going on of what it means to be an artist, and what it means to appreciate artistry. Over time we've developed the idea that art, once created, is not free for the observing; the artist has a right to compensation. 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.
    • mistrial9 9mo ago
      > Appropriation is becoming easier 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 ?
      • pixl97 9mo ago
        The analogies you're trying to connect are suspect at best.
        • mistrial9 9mo ago
          could you please quiet down? my NVidia options are very sensitive
    • bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
      >- The most straightforward way to show support and appreciation for art is to give the artist money 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?
  • mvdtnz 9mo ago
    "Cultural appropriation" is a totally separate issue to intellectual property and copyright. You're muddying the waters by conflating the two. 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.
    • NeutralCrane 9mo ago
      They are both predicated on the concept of ownership of ideas. The reason IP law seems reasonable and cultural appropriation doesn’t is simply a matter of conditioning, not because one is inherently less nonsensical than the other.
  • mock-possum 9mo ago
    This kind of “oh everybody does it” dismissiveness towards cultural appropriation comes off as possibly ignorant but awfully insensitive. What is your understanding of the term? What does it describe, and when people use it as a negative, what legitimate issues are they concerned about?
  • pinnochio 9mo ago
    Call me when OpenAI gives away all its intellectual property for free.
  • larodi 9mo ago
    We are all plagiarists the moment we touch AI
  • ottah 9mo ago
    I think the obsession with making much of all communication a capital asset treats a basic human behavior as theft. Imitation, remixing, and borrowing are a fundamental part of human communication. Copyright serves the interests of capital, not culture.
• telliott1984 9mo ago
  I really don't know how I feel about that Ctrl/Control joke.
  • zeroonetwothree 9mo ago
    It’s classic Economist humor
• rectang 9mo ago
  Cutting back the power of creators dramatically increases the power of distributors. Do we really want the vast majority of economic benefit for human creativity to flow to middlemen?
  • cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
    That's been the trend, yes. 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"
    • fc417fc802 9mo ago
      > How can I get my finger in the pie somewhere here? Given the performance of open weight models to date it looks as though that might prove fairly difficult in the medium to long term.
  • wizzwizz4 9mo ago
    And strengthening copyright causes the distributors to assign themselves the new copyrights in take-it-or-leave-it contracts. Making author's rights non-transferable (as in, e.g., Germany) goes some way to preventing this.
  • rcxdude 9mo ago
    I would say that copyright empowers distributors more than creators, especially in the age of the internet where distribution is otherwise cheap and commoditized. The creator has the ability to make more but a finite capability to create, the distributor only has the copyright that they own, but an almost unbounded ability to accumulate more.
    • rectang 9mo ago
      Right now, distributors have to compete with each other in terms of the content they provide — if your competitor offers Taylor Swift or AP News stories or Marvel movies but you don't, your consumers care and may flee. 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.
• jryio 9mo ago
  Think about how it feels when you toil on a hard problem, do your best work, release it to the work in the spirit of openness and sharing Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.
  • mock-possum 9mo ago
    Are those feelings serving you? What consideration do you choose to afford to those feelings?
  • spicyusername 9mo ago
    Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution. Further facilitating millions, or even billions, of other people to discover new ideas and create new things. It's not hard to see the benefit of that. 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.
    • fc417fc802 9mo ago
      > the purpose of IP laws are psychological, rather than moral. 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.
      • spicyusername 9mo ago
        Right, right. 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.
• mbanerjeepalmer 9mo ago
  > Universities are increasingly turning to AI to spot AI-written work (even as students use services like Dumb it Down to make their AI-fuelled work sound more believable). It can be detected. Chris Caren, the boss of Turnitin, a popular plagiarism detector, describes plagiarised prose as “beige”: “well-written, but not very dynamic”. It has verbal tics: it is keen on dreary words like “holistic” and notably keen on “notably”. 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/document/Evaluating%20the%20Effectiveness%20of%20Turnitin%E2%80%99s%20AI%20Writing%20Indicator%20Model.pdf https://teaching.temple.edu/sites/teaching/files/media/docum...
  • j45 9mo ago
    What would be high enough? I agree 90% isn't perfect, but neither are LLMs.
    • jimbob45 9mo ago
      If I get AI to generate an essay and rewrite every word with my own whilst keeping the same general meaning of the original text, surely there’s no reasonable way to detect that, right? 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.
      • kiba 9mo ago
        Just don't grade essay? Make it clear that eassy are optional and not required to get a grade, but it's a good way to learn. That will cut down the amount of work to be done too. They failing exams because they don't do the work is on them.
      • j45 9mo ago
        There will be because over time the lazy and passive copying will itself become lazy and bring in more of the ai patterns. 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!
• coldtea 9mo ago
  No, speak for yourselves.
• add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
  We spend a lot of time talking about the fairness of how LLMs are trained but not enough time talking about the fact that mediocre people now have a faucet they can turn on to flood work and content into the world effortlessly at volume.
• xandrius 9mo ago
  Here is my very simple view: - 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?
  • alansaber 9mo ago
    I think this is correct, and that it's school (which with good intentions) overemphasises the importance of complete originality
    • SoftTalker 9mo ago
      It's less about originality than crediting sources. 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.
      • yulker 9mo ago
        how do you account for the compilation of your insight that was formed through the consumption of many prior examples? do you feel compelled to thoroughly cite them, or have they crossed a threshold marked through your ability to now generate new similar things without directly referencing them that it's "all original you" now?
        • 9mo ago
• renewiltord 9mo ago
  Something I found disappointing is discovering what plagiarists the ancient greats were. Take Paradise Lost for instance. The entire thing is unoriginal and fan fiction derivative work of the Bible (itself questionable) 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”.
  • mock-possum 9mo ago
    Honey there ain’t nothing new under the sun.
    • renewiltord 9mo ago
      Umm excuse me. Are you going to use an LLM to plagiarize or are you going to cite that?
• amelius 9mo ago
  Good artists copy, great artists steal. -- me
• beardyw 9mo ago
  Here's question, if nobody had ever written science fiction, would AI do it. I don't think so.
  • hannasanarion 9mo ago
    Science fiction is as old as fiction. The Epic of Gilgamesh (2000BC) and Ramayana (500BC) have sci-fi elements. There's nothing innovative or unique about stories that imagine a future instead of a past, present, or alternate reality. Genres are too vague and generic to be ownable by anybody. Inspiration is not plagiarism.
  • boznz 9mo ago
    As far as I am aware AI wont write/do anything without an input prompt.. or has something changed ?
  • Rexxar 9mo ago
    There is some LLM trained only with old content, maybe someone can describe a style invented after the more recent content and told the AI to do a novel with that style and see what the result is and compare it to the "real" style.
  • tacheiordache 9mo ago
    I think you mean if AI was never trained on science fiction, would it ever be capable to produce science fiction and the answer is probably not. At least LLMs need a huge body of training to produce derivatives
• mikelitoris 9mo ago
  Wow, I love the illustration!
• Nifty3929 9mo ago
  Without arguing the broader topic, I do think there's an important distinction between plagiarism in fiction and non-fiction or academic work: The theft of ideas 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
  • crazygringo 9mo ago
    > 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. 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.
  • NeutralCrane 9mo ago
    The “theft of ideas” is itself an absurd notion. The true tragedy of AI is that in response people are reflexively embracing the dystopian concepts of IP and copyright, rather than merely tolerating it like in years past.
• tiku 9mo ago
  I've built a react invoicing tool, I can't help but think that it probably ripped of a bunch of code. I've added my own touch now but it seems like it was wat faster with generation.but then again, it's hardly rocket science.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• erelong 9mo ago
  More like maybe we are acknowledging "intellectual property" was always a fiction
  • justonceokay 9mo ago
    There’s two issues here. Plagiarizing as stealing from another source (damages to 3rd party), and plagiarizing as pretending another’s ideas are your own (damages to self). 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.
• nnutter 9mo ago
  I'd highly recommend RiP!: A Remix Manifesto [Grokipedia](https://grokipedia.com/page/rip_a_remix_manifesto https://grokipedia.com/page/rip_a_remix_manifesto) [YouTube](https://youtu.be/quO_Dzm4rnk https://youtu.be/quO_Dzm4rnk). It's been a long time since I watched it but I'll have to re-watch it. Keep in mind this came out almost 20 years ago, well before LLMs. I don't know where we'll land but humans are also remix machines, that's what creativity is, I think the beauty of what LLMs are is the first technology that has captured some essence of creativity. Of course, it's lacking direct emotion/sentiment but I also think people are failing to understand the role of the human in using the LLM. We are the final filter that is recognizing quality, projecting emotion/sentiment, etc.
• zahlman 9mo ago
  > What counts as intellectual theft—and what is considered acceptable borrowing or inspiration—are the great questions of the AI era.... Part of the problem is that there is no precise definition of plagiarism—it ranges from verbatim copying to the fudgier theft of concepts. > ... > 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?
• msteffen 9mo ago
  I think IP kind of breaks a lot of engineers' brains (despite how much of it they create) because a lot of IP law is about intent, and their theory of mind is so bad that the idea of a body of law based on deduced intent, and the ways a court might deduce their intent if they used someone else's IP, are totally alien to them.
  • NeutralCrane 9mo ago
    Or it’s that there is a class of people (“creatives”) who have allowed themselves to become convinced that the idea of private ownership of ideas isn’t completely dystopian and anti-human, because their personal income is reliant on it.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
  "But also, surely, because it is fun. Plagiarism stories follow a perfect tragic arc: a flawed hero suffers a whopping comeuppance. It is a wonderful spectacle." 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
• squirrellous 9mo ago
  Anecdotal perspective. I’m usually ok with others copying my code since code feels less personal (for lack of a better word). The other day I found a prompt for internal AI that copied my technical arguments in prose verbatim without attribution. This felt very wrong and invasive. It made me much more sympathetic to people with intellectual work out in the public domain.