[WCSTombs]

Taking credit for something you didn't do, whether it was done by another person or by an LLM, is dishonest and unethical. Prompting an LLM to create something is obviously not the same thing as creating it, and I feel this article is trying to normalize tacit plagiarism. In most contexts I'm aware of where assigning credit actually matters, human authorship and LLM authorship are very much distinguished, and failing to "credit the LLM" in some cases can even have legal consequences.

(You don't have to mention LLMs every time you use them because sometimes the credit really doesn't matter.)

> But for the first reason, I’d challenge the notion of sharing credit with a tool, let alone feeling like a cheat for using one.

That's the main reason LLMs aren't "just a tool."

> Credit and accountability are two sides of the same coin. A tool can only take as much credit as it can be held accountable for, so crediting it inadvertently dilutes your own accountability for the work.

Huh? No, credit and accountability are pretty orthogonal. I use tons of open-source tools, and everyone agrees that the respective authors get credit for what they made, but only I am accountable for my use of them. In fact, all open-source licenses spell this out explicitly.

[antihipocrat]

If I plan a project to build an app and write the full technical specifications and architecture myself, draft data structures, and even provide logic suggestions, and then hand it over to a team of humans to implement - it is at least my teams work. A case can be made that it still primarily my own work (no one expresses much issue with the title: Sid Meier's Civilization as an example).

If I have a large amount of capital to burn, and an idea that begins and ends with 'build me a Groupon clone for x market', then just pour money into a team of outsourced humans at a software sweatshop to build it. Is it still my work? Again, not many people would object if I were the face of that company, it is after all my app.

I'm struggling to see what the difference is if humans were swapped with LLMs in each case? Is the issue that the LLM models were trained on plagiarized code? I agree we should take issue this aspect, but when it comes to being honest about credit for the 'doing' part, this has never been the case, pre or post LLMs.

[WCSTombs]

I don't understand this rebuttal at all. There is a huge difference between having an idea and implementing it yourself, and handing your idea (plus suggestions and data structures or whatever) to other people to implement. In the latter case, the team completing the project gets a lot of credit for the work. That has certainly been the case everywhere I've worked, and I wouldn't have it any other way, even in cases where I was more of the concept guy. I haven't played Civilization, but I'm sure if you play it to the end, you'll see a nice list of people who worked on the game, not just Sid Meier.

[antihipocrat]

So are you saying we should have a credits doc for all major contributors to all software and hardware products, both human and LLM? I'd agree with that, this is not available at the moment for the most popular and profitable products in use currently.