[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.