[GuB-42]

And what's wrong with not wanting to write functions yourself? It is a perfectly reasonable thing, and in some cases (ex: crypto), rolling your own is strongly discouraged. That's the reason why libraries exist, you don't want to implement your own associative array every time your work needs it do you?

As for plagiarism, it is not something to even consider when writing code, unless your code is an art project. If someone else's code does the job better then yours, that's the code you should use, you are not trying to be original, you are trying to make a working product. There is the problem of intellectual property laws, but it is narrower than plagiarism. For instance, writing an open source drop-in replacement of some proprietary software is common practice, it is legal and often celebrated as long as it doesn't contain the original software code, in art, it would be plagiarism.

Copyright laundering is a problem though, and AI is very resource intensive for a result of dubious quality sometimes. But that just shows that it is not a good enough "plagiarism machine", not that using a "plagiarism machine" is wrong.

[voidUpdate]

If I use a package for crypto stuff, it will generally be listed as part of the project, in an include or similar, so you can see who actually wrote the code. If you get an LLM to create it, it will write some "new original code" for you, with no ability to tell you any of the names of people who's code went into that, and who did not give their consent for it to be mangled into the algorithm.

If I copy work from someone else, whether that be a paragraph of writing, a code block or art, and do not credit them, passing it off as my own creation, that's plagiarism. If the plagiarism machine can give proper attribution and context, it's not a plagiarism machine anymore, but given the incredibly lossy nature of LLMS, I don't foresee that happening. A search engine is different, as it provides attribution for the content it's giving you (ignoring the "ai summary" that is often included now). If you go to my website and copy code from me, you know where the code came from, because you got it from my website

[hnfong]

Why is "plagiarism" "bad"?

Modern society seems to assume any work by a person is due to that person alone, and credits that person only. But we know that is not the case. Any work by an author is the culmination of a series of contributions, perhaps not to the work directly, but often to the author, giving them the proper background and environment to do the work. The author is simply one that built upon the aggregate knowledge in the world and added a small bit of their own ideas.

I think it is bad taste to pass another's work as your own, and I believe people should be economically compensated for creating art and generating ideas, but I do not believe people are entitled to claim any "ownership" of ideas. IMHO, it is grossly egoistic.