alt Hacker NewsCertainly if a human wrote code that solved this problem, and a second human copied and tweaked it slightly for their use case, we would have a word for them.
Would we use the same word if two different humans wrote code that solved two different problems, but one part of each problem was somewhat analogous to a different aspect of a third human's problem, and the third human took inspiration from those parts of both solutions to create code that solved a third problem?
What if it were ten different humans writing ten different-but-related pieces of code, and an eleventh human piecing them together? What if it were 1,000 different humans?
I think "plagiarism", "inspiration", and just "learning from" fall on some continuous spectrum. There are clear differences when you zoom out, but they are in degree, and it's hard to set a hard boundary. The key is just to make sure we have laws and norms that provide sufficient incentive for new ideas to continue to be created.
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They key difference between plagarism and building on someone's work is whether you say, "this based on code by linsey at github.com/socialnorms" or "here, let me write that for you."
In case of LLMs, due to RAG, very often it's not just learning but almost direct real-time plagiarism from concrete sources.
> we have laws and norms that provide sufficient incentive for new ideas to continue to be created
Indeed, and up until the advent of 'AI' we did. But that incentive is being killed right now and I don't see any viable replacement on the horizon.
Thanks for writing this - love the way u explain the pov. I wish people would consider this angle more
> What if it were ten different humans writing ten different-but-related pieces of code, and an eleventh human piecing them together? What if it were 1,000 different humans?
What if it was just a single person? I take it you didn't read any of the code in the ocaml vibe pr that was posted a bit ago? The one where Claude copied non just implementation specifics, but even the copyright headers from a named, specific person.
It's clear that you can have no idea if the magic black box is copying from a single source, or from many.
So your comment boils down to; plagiarism is fine as long as I don't have to think about it. Are you really arguing that's ok?
Ask for something like "a first person shooter using software rendering", and search github for the function names for the rendering functions. Using Copilot I found code simply lifted from implementations of Doom, except that "int" was replaced with "int32_t" and similar.
It's also fun to tell Copilot that the code will violate a license. It will seemingly always tell you it's fine. Safe legal advice.