[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.