Are large language models plagiarism machines, as some pending lawsuits allege?
Large language models, or LLMs, are the technology behind modern “generative AI” services like ChatGPT and Gemini.1 Their design mimics some aspects of how real brains absorb, encode, recall, and synthesize information. To the extent that that’s true, it’s hard to see how to call their output plagiarism — at least, not without also calling human writers plagiarists. Creativity is just combining sources, and it’s not plagiarism if you combine enough of them.
And yet, even if LLMs work exactly like human brains, there’s one thing they can do that humans can’t, and it means that the authors and artists currently suing OpenAI and Google and others do have a legitimate complaint, albeit a slightly different one than they think.
Join me on a discursive journey…
Continue reading “Large language models and plagiarism”