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by onion2k 2269 days ago
Hints: wizards owls spells castles Prompt: Once there was a wizard who lived in a castle with his pet owl.

Output after clicking the Continue button a few times;

"Once there was a wizard who lived in a castle with his pet owl. The owl would fly around the castle, and whenever it saw something that looked like an enemy, it would scream . The wizard had a secret room where he stored his weapons and whatnot. One day, the owl was taking a nap when it heard a voice outside. The owl screamed in a low, low voice. "Tyls, wake up! You'll be all right. We just need to get you out of here."

The man looked at the two and then back up at his wife."

I'm interested in where the name "Tyls" came from. After a quick Google, there's a wizard called Tyls in this Harry Potter fanfic - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/811088/72/Not-Myself - that seems a very likely source.

Could using this app open you up to accusations of plagiarism?

2 comments

I have my doubts about (accusations of) plagiarism being an issue, and even more so w.r.t. copyright. The first usually involves copying of "larger" features, such as storylines. If the model manages to do that, it would actually be quite impressive. The latter would involve wholesale copying of paragraphs, something that I haven't seen happening with any models.

But I'd be careful about the danger of something like this reproducing stereotypes–especially those that might have become less acceptable over the last two decades or so but may linger in training texts older than that.

It isn't far from the owl/wizard example to every banker being "Mr. Rosenberg", for example.

I won't rule it out completely. AI works by training on a large corpus of data, so some of that will be reflected in generated text.

However, the algorithm does not copy stuff verbatim from the corpus, but uses its "learning" (in the Machine Learning" sense.

So, generally one should be safe. Doing a quick check is recommended if you are using substantial portions as is.

Using a proper noun is completely fine though.