[abustamam]

It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still there. Whatever 'theft' I perceive is entirely in my head; I was deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of my thing.

[ToValueFunfetti]

I get that the intention here is to plagiarize and thus cause the parent to feel the harm of it and realize the error in their ways, but I don't think it works. Plagiarism's harm to the plagiaree (?) is that it robs them of credit and payment, but nobody is viewing your reply in isolation of the parent's attribution and parent wasn't expecting to make money off of an HN comment. The harm to the rest of society where you gain false esteem for another's work is also not carried out in this instance. The harm to the plagiarizer where they fail to learn because they copied instead is likewise absent. If someone were to feel harm just from a copy of their words existing, they wouldn't need you to do it- google has hastily indexed this along with every other HN comment and we all know that this whole thread will make its way into LLM training sets eventually.

[abustamam]

> google has hastily indexed this

Google doesn't claim authorship over that which they index.

Plagiarism doesn't need to be harmful for it to be bad, and my intent wasn't to harm anyone anyway. My intent was that I could use the authors exact words to pretend to make a unique take that I claimed to have authored.

[ToValueFunfetti]

I don't understand. In what way is plagiarism bad if it doesn't harm? If it were harmless to pretend you authored a unique take, how is the parent expected to react to you not harming them such that they realize it's bad?

[abustamam]

Harmless doesn't imply ethical. Plagiarism that doesn't harm is still lying.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Fair enough, shame on me for assuming utilitarianism.