[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.