[matthewdgreen]

If I type a series of bullet points into ChatGPT and ask it to re-phrase them in better English prose, am I plagiarizing? If it's not plagiarism but I screw up at copy/pasting, does it become plagiarism? I don't know! It is not something I personally would ever do because I like my own writing. But I'm also not going to throw that accusation at ESL authors who are using a writing tool (like Autocorrect-on-steroids) to convey original ideas to an audience, at least not until we've had a much longer community discussion on using these tools.

ETA I would urge you not to throw the death penalty at people whose crime may be more akin to shoplifting. This is bad both for the shoplifters and for people who want to fight serious crime. Plagiarism is one of the most serious accusations in science: casually tossing it around like this risks our ability to enforce it against serious offenders.

[folmar]

> If I type a series of bullet points into ChatGPT and ask it to re-phrase them in better English prose, am I plagiarizing?

I think the OP's point is that you could be, and should check, as such models sometimes reproduce parts their training set. You should check what you send, or, in other words, take responsibility for the tools you use -- the tools that are bread and butter are somewhat excused, but LLM are not at the moment.

[thfuran]

>like Autocorrect-on-steroids

It's a difference in quality large enough to constitute a difference in kind. Autocorrect nominally takes text in your own words as typed and converts them into your words as intended. Chatgpt used as you describe does not produce text in the author's own words.

[matthewdgreen]

As children in grade school we are taught a series of rules about plagiarism that are designed to make us extremely sensitive about what we copy from. We're taught this because if you let a group of children do whatever they want, they'll copy stuff straight off Wikipedia or each other and thus they won't learn how to write properly. So we teach them that writing every word yourself is the most important goal to aspire to.

As an adult in a scientific field, what actually matters to me is having original scientific ideas conveyed to me in an efficient manner. I'm not really interested in applying arbitrary elementary-school rules on authors, as long as they aren't stealing ideas and text from other people (thus misallocating credit in ways that are harmful to progress.) I think as a community we should proceed from these principles, then work the details out from there.

[dragonwriter]

> As an adult in a scientific field, what actually matters to me is having original scientific ideas conveyed to me in an efficient manner. I'm not really interested in applying arbitrary elementary-school rules on authors, as long as they aren't stealing ideas and text from other people.

The elementary school rules, at least the ones I weas taught decades ago, are pretty much “don’t steal ideas and text from other people”. Like, literally, other than for formatting, there were exactly three rules avout plagiarism I was taught on this in elementary school, and only one of them becomes slightly fuzzier outside of that context:

(1) if you use exactly wording from someone else, put it in quotes and cite the source,

(2) if you use an idea from someone else, cite the source but don't ise quotes, and

(3) if an idea comes from three or more independent sources, you don’t need to cite it, it can be treated as “common knowledge”.

Outside of elementary school, yeah, whether something is genuinely common knowledge or should be cited to multiple sources is fuzzier and context dependent, but the other two rules apply pretty directly.

[matthewdgreen]

If the source is Microsoft Word's grammar correction engine, do we require people to quote and cite that? The question here is whether "quote and cite" should apply to ChatGPT (used exclusively for re-wording existing text.) And I think my principles in the post above provide a better framework for thinking about that question than the grade-school rules (and rules for citing texts, which is again a different situation.)

[thfuran]

>“don’t steal ideas and text from other people”

Then the rules you were taught were far more lax than those I learned. According to the rules I was taught, copying lines from your own prior work without attribution would also be plagiarism.

[thfuran]

And it's fine if that's what matters to you, but I think there's legitimate room for contention on the meaning of authorship or plagiarism when it comes to something like this. If a work is written in one language and translated by another person into English, I'd expect the translator to be credited. Is the sole purpose of crediting the translator acknowledging their effort or does it also serve to acknowledge that the other author can't necessarily vouch for translation or as an indication of provence? If it's not translated by a human, should the translation software be similarly credited? If the writing process consisted of one person writing a bulleted list outline and another person converting that to full prose, I'd certainly expect that person to be credited as an author. What about the case where that step was done by software?

[matthewdgreen]

My point is that it's not what matters to me. Our rules shouldn't be vacuous, they should be founded in real goals that advance science. In science we want people to communicate ideas clearly, we want the ideas to be accurate, and we want to allocate credit properly to authors. Adding a rule that says "you must say you used ChatGPT or you get punished" is unlikely to advance any real goal -- it will just lead to most authors adding that footnote, and a few people getting arbitrarily punished for forgetting it.

[thfuran]

>Our rules shouldn't be vacuous

That something concerns matters of little personal interest to you doesn't make it vacuous.