The law broadly agrees with you here.

Non transformative use -> Not cool.

Transformative -> it's fine

Original work attempting to deceive or confuse the origin as being by another. -> not cool

Original work emulating the style of another without attempting to imply involvement of the other -> it's fine.

> People adore Star Wars, which is an absolute one to one of a hero's journey, it still has value.

Yeah but A Hero's Journey is not a literal story, it's more of a framework written in a book called "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" for what makes a story interesting and how various original stories like myths, folklore etc (like the Bible) always followed the same pattern.

The author dissected that pattern, and then it has been followed by many writers/creators for what is considered to be a good model of a story. Screenwriting classes literally teach it, along with other stuff like The Three Act structure etc.

And if you really look into, almost all good stories follow that pattern to some extent, but it is the implementation that makes each story special.

It's like a bit like saying "People adore [x] webapp which is an absolute one to one of React, it still has value" but both are fundamentally different things.

I think this is correct, and that it's school (which with good intentions) overemphasises the importance of complete originality

Everything Is A Remix.

Producing something entirely novel in an act of pure creativity is essentially a tall tale - like Newton and the Apple - possibly some truth to it, but definitely mythologized.

I tried a lot of these tools, including Turnitin, and I think they are all wrong. Not because they are a bad implementation, but just because the problem is naturally impossible in a lot of cases.

There are people whose style is closer to AI, that doesn't mean they used AI. And sometimes AI outputs text that look like a human would write.

There is also the mix: if I write two pages and I used two sentences by AI (because I was tired and I couldn't find the right sentence), I may be flagged for using AI. Even worse, if I ask AI for advice and then I rewrite it myself, what would be the output? I can make a reasoning that both (AI written and not AI written) would be wrong.

Yeah, and to be blunt, beige and not dynamic is how I would describe most student writing done entirely by the human. I just don't see how a model, trained on a vast corpus of such writing, could ever be successfully and reliably distinguished from human writing. You can distinguish good writing from so-so writing, that's about it.

In an educational context, the only purpose of the writing has traditionally been learning, and the purpose of turning it in has been to prove that the learning took place. Both of those are out the window now. Classroom discussion and oral presentations might be the only place you can still prove learning took place. Until everybody gets hidden AI-powered earpieces of course.

I take suspicious student papers and feed them to Turnitin, as well as the popular LLMs. Hey ChatGTP, give me a report on the likelihood that this paper was generated by an LLM. Do that with Gemini, Claude, etc.

Then if there's a high probability, I look through the references in the paper. Do they say what the student attributes to them?

Finally, if I still think it's AI-generated, I have the student in and ask questions about the paper. "You said this here in this paragraph -- what do you mean by that?"

AI detectors are a first-pass, but I think a human really needs to be in the loop to evaluate whether it's cheating, or just using something to clean up grammar and spelling.

> [can’t] be reliably detected… only ~90% effective

I’m surprised to see these comments in conjunction, 90% is pretty good, and much higher than i expected. I wonder what’s the breakdown of false positives/false negatives

Edit: from the linked paper

> Of the 90 samples in which AI was used, it correctly identified 77 of them as having >1% AI generated text, an 86% success rate. The fact that the tool is more accurate in identifying human-generated text than AI-generated text is by design. The company realized that users would be unwilling to use a tool that produced significant numbers of false positives, so they “tuned” the tool to give human writers the benefit of the doubt.

This all seems exceptionally reasonable. Of the samples with AI, they correctly identify 86%. Of the samples without AI, they correctly identify a higher proportion, because of the nature of their service. This implies that if they _wanted_ to make a more balanced AI detection tool, they could get that 86% somewhat higher.

> Turnitin is only ~90% effective:

No it isn't. Stop.

The cynical part of me says that the people who share this link with that summary are the cheaters trying to avoid getting caught, on the basis of the fact that they are patently abusing the numbers presumably because they didn't pay attention in math class.

The tests are 90% SENSITIVE. That means that of 100 AI cheaters, 10 won't be caught.

The paper you linked says the tests are 100% SPECIFIC. That means they will *never* flag a human-written paper as mostly AI.

Honestly reading that article made me more less worried about AI-detection. My main concern is false positives (incorrectly identifying a human-written text as AI-written), but it seems Turnitin got that close to 0.

Of course the sample size is fairly small, I would want a larger scale study to see if the false positive rate is actually 5%, or 1%, 0.1%, 0.000001%, etc.

Turnitin is in weird spot. And probably impossible one. Academic writing is trained to be academic writing. With mesta text and phrases. And students and writers tend to follow conventions they see in other academic texts. As do AI.

On some level the human output in academic setting is expected to be well formulaic in way AI generated text is.

Which often could lead to false positives.

What would be high enough? I agree 90% isn't perfect, but neither are LLMs.

> Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.

Everything I write, every thought I have, and the output of my every creative endeavor is profoundly shaped by the work of others that I have ingested, compressed, and iterated on over the course of my lifetime, yet I have the audacity to call it my own. Any meager success I may have, I attribute to naught but my own ingenosity.

    Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.

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.

You are conflating work and work product. There's a difference between being acknowledged and compensated for doing hard work, and receiving property rights over the work product.

If you are an employee, you get paid for building something (work), and the employer owns the thing that was built (work product). If you are self-employed, it's the other way around. You don't get paid for the work, but you own the work product. Employees generally don't work for free, and the self-employed generally don't give away their capital for free.

If you opt to "release it to the [world] in the spirit of openness and sharing," then you built capital for free and gave it away for free. If you didn't want others to capitalize on the capital, then why did you give it away?

If you want attribution, then either get paid for the work and add it to your resume, or exchange your work product for attribution (e.g., let people visit the Jryio Museum, build a Jryio brand, become known in your community as a creative leader, etc.). If you give it away for free, then your expectations should include the possibility that people will take it for free.

I would be fine with it personally. But I'm a mathematician not an artist.

Are those feelings serving you?

What consideration do you choose to afford to those feelings?

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.

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"

> 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.

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

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.

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.

As far as I am aware AI wont write/do anything without an input prompt.. or has something changed ?

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.

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.

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.

Call me when OpenAI gives away all its intellectual property for free.

We are all plagiarists the moment we touch AI

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...

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?

> “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.

"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.

This account was created one hour we should ignore this comment. :)

It’s classic Economist humor

Honey there ain’t nothing new under the sun.