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| title | tags | date | draft | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plagiarism IS Bad, Actually |
|
2024-01-13 | false |
Expect this page to expand. I plan on fleshing it out it in tandem with a full argument on why AI training and output are both copyright infringement when the model was trained on copyrighted data, because copyright and plagiarism are inextricably linked.
My Position
I think all works published that hold themselves out as informative or authoritative should properly inform the reader what they used to draw their conclusions.
To comport with my own beliefs, on this website, I:
- Provide links to webpages for programs/projects I discuss, including documentation as needed.
- See all of the Programs I Like/home
- Write blurbs about the sources I found the most helpful or persuasive (with links), and often hyperlink less argumentative statements of fact with a supporting reference.
And when using my work, I request:
- That you link to the page you mention/quote/paraphrase.
- That you never use my work to train an LLM because its output is then plagiarizing my work (and post-hoc attribution will not remedy that use in this specific case)
However, note that much of the entries here are my personal perspective on the subject matter, so much of this website falls under "my source is I made it up" and needs no attribution.
Where My Views Originate
There are two institutions in my life that have most certainly contributed to my broader position on attribution.
Coming from academia, my culture is very much "show your work." It was always beneficial to me personally to be able to point to someone much more decorated than myself and go "see? They share my conclusion." I'm not commenting on whether the academy's meritocracy is a good system (as I'm very much not qualified to do so), but following the rules of the institution and citing my sources allowed me to reach a broader audience without much effort on my part beyond what was necessary to create work product.
The legal field is even more source-mandatory due to the system of precedent, that judges must follow the rules set by prior decisions binding on their court. The onus is almost entirely on the advocates to inform the judge what they must do (while arguing what they should do). The profession places very little value on original statements as a result. The expression inherent in how you arrange the statements of others, combined with your ability to find favorable statements, is what determines your skill level as an attorney.
There's definitely a gap in my knowlege/views that broadens the more creative or traditionally-considered-artistic the subject matter gets. Copyright absolutely extends to the arts, but what place does attribution have when the purpose is to entertain? One can hardly document one's creative experience when working on a novel, a script, a painting, in the same way a legal brief can be. I do believe in the necessity of personal attribution for those who directly contributed to an artistic work (think the credits section of a movie) for professional reasons, but beyond that, I'm uncertain.
Digital Gardening and Plagiarism
For digital gardening in particular, attribution is integral to the concept. Misc/what-is-a-garden is a network, and the culture of the digital garden is to provide paths out of the current webpage to others on the same site or even to other websites. These associations between webpages make up a comprehensive experience that differs from modern web use (Google search, click, close the tab) and looks more like Wikipedia spelunking.
Thus, the true value of attribution in a digital garden is mostly in the link itself rather than the substance of the current page or the linked page.
To-be-written
I want to address piece-by-piece an argument by Brian Frye supporting plagiarism in general. He's a prolific IP scholar, so I'll probably look through his academic works as well (Against Creativity, 11 N.Y.U. J.L. & Liberty 426 (2017), looks pretty interesting). To be clear, I don't want to get into the absolute witch hunt that inspired the linked article, but in the article he reiterates his greater conclusions about attribution to say that ALL plagiarism accusations are silly, which are what I want to respond to.
- Planned topics: granularity, necessity, nature of the work/merit, nature of the work/type of content.
Anyone who identifies as a "proud plagiarist," this is your notice that I may respond to your opinions, and I will properly attribute you when doing so.
- Readers: Don't harass anyone I cite, please. We disagree on the topic, and since all it really bears on is respect and authoritative nature until it goes into copyright infringement territory, there aren't any high stakes.
I'm dying to dig into enterprise software engineering and attribution/licensing as well. "The StackOverflow problem" is something that the industry has been struggling with for years, and there are some pretty strong counter arguments to my position that come out of critique of softeng and originality. Given the existence of Copilot, this ties into AI as well.