Plagiarism is claiming someone else’s specific work as your own. Using a generative tool is closer to using a compiler, an IDE, or a library. I’m not copying a person’s code or submitting someone else’s project with the name filed off. I’m directing a system, reviewing the output, editing it, and taking responsibility for the result.
If I paste in a blog post verbatim and pretend I wrote it, that’s plagiarism. If I use a tool to generate a starting point and shape it into what I need, that’s just a different kind of authorship.
> If I paste in a blog post verbatim and pretend I wrote it, that’s plagiarism. If I use a tool to generate a starting point and shape it into what I need, that’s just a different kind of authorship.
If you cloned chapters from multiple books, from multiple different authors, didn't decide on the sentence structure, didn't choose the words yourself, didn't decide which order your going to place these chapters, didn't name the characters. At what point do you no longer get credit for writing the book?
What if it's code? what if you didn't decide which order you should call these functions. Didn't make the decision about if you're gonna write var i, or idx, or index. Didn't make a decision if this should be an u32, or an i64. Didn't read any of the source code from that new dependency you just added. Didn't name the functions, oh but no, you did have to edit that one function because it wouldn't compile, so you just renamed it like the error suggested... At what point does the effort you put in become less significant than the effort duplicated from the training set? How much of the function do you have to write yourself, before you take credit? How many chars have to by typed by your fingers, before you claim. You made this?
What I described was directing, reviewing, and editing. You’ve ignored that entirely to construct a version of me who pastes “write me an app” and ships it unread… then spent three paragraphs righteously tearing that down. I own the intent, the spec, the judgment about what’s correct, and the blame when it breaks. That’s authorship, and that’s why using a generative tool isn’t plagiarism. The rest is breathless gibberish dressed up as moral clarity.
> What I described was directing, reviewing, and editing.
You didn't actually describe any of that though? You asserted that's what you do, but didn't describe any of those steps.
If you do, you'd be the first person I see actually do that when using LLM codegen. Most people who advocate for it, do behave that way. You're mistakenly taking my rhetorical argument against the more common, and substituting your own interpretation of how things are. Which is the very thing you're attempting to chastise me for doing. Just as you're unconvinced by my rejection of your hypothetical, I'm unconvinced by yours.
I might agree if you spend the same amount of time and effort, it wouldn't count as plagiarism. But if it's not faster, then what's the point?
> The rest is breathless gibberish dressed up as moral clarity.
Sure, that's a fair interpretation if you want to feel like a superior asshole. But really I was attempting to describe how I view the way most people interact with LLM codegen, before claiming they did all the work. Which if you recall, was my original question; why is that view wrong? What details would convince me I've misunderstood something?
You've made a straw man of how people use codegen and are not willing to change your opinion even though people are telling you this is not how they use code gen.
I've replied much deeper in the other thread. But my concrete problem is that insubstantial arguments can't override the overwhelming evidence I've already acquired. Just trust me bro; I'm different from every other vibe coder you've seen dump slop on somebody, might be true but is not very compelling.
I don't care about how you use codegen, I want to understand why you discard all of the process, while still claiming credit for writing it? Perhaps you don't say I wrote this. Or I made this. Perhaps you do say, I asked an LLM to create this. Or disclose an LLM generated most of the lines. Or perhaps you do modify most of it, but I've never seen the latter in real life. And even then, that doesn't help answer my question about when people who aren't built different like you, why isn't that plagiarism?
Because when I look at something created by the team, I do give the engineering manager credit for their contributions, they helped build the team. But I definitely don't think they helped create the thing.
If I paste in a blog post verbatim and pretend I wrote it, that’s plagiarism. If I use a tool to generate a starting point and shape it into what I need, that’s just a different kind of authorship.