In the quote the author is speaking about students handing in an assignment and using ChatGPT to write it. He says:
> This may not count as plagiarism, but it won’t produce anything new.
First, it is plagiarism by definition. Any time one presents work as their own which they did not create themselves is plagiarism .
Second, and vastly more importantly going forward, students were never handing in “new” ideas on an assignment. Using an LLM to generate a “pastiche” that is then read by the student (hopefully) before being handed in is still a win in my book. Having students ask their questions to an LLM can be an amazing tool to further learning but when students and educators are terrified of this new tool they will hide their usage of it and then it becomes a tool for copying rather than learning and plagiarism is the only consequence.
There's a bit of a motte-and-bailey situation here - the student clearly plagiarized if they passed off ChatGPT's work as their own, but this has no bearing on the more interesting question of whether ChatGPT itself "plagiarizes" from its training set or creates new knowledge by synthesizing it.
>Any time one presents work as their own which they did not create themselves is plagiarism .
Not sure this is true. If I hand in an assignment that is written strictly by scattering chicken bones into a grid representing the most common English words and writing down the result is that plagiarism? It will definitely be non-sense, but i'm not copying anyone else's work.
chatGPT is just a more sophisticated chicken bone grid.
> This may not count as plagiarism, but it won’t produce anything new.
First, it is plagiarism by definition. Any time one presents work as their own which they did not create themselves is plagiarism .
Second, and vastly more importantly going forward, students were never handing in “new” ideas on an assignment. Using an LLM to generate a “pastiche” that is then read by the student (hopefully) before being handed in is still a win in my book. Having students ask their questions to an LLM can be an amazing tool to further learning but when students and educators are terrified of this new tool they will hide their usage of it and then it becomes a tool for copying rather than learning and plagiarism is the only consequence.