Thought provoking post! I have a couple of thoughts:
1. When you say that ChatGPT is only good for rote copy editing, what else have you tried? Personally I think that it's coding is remarkably good. Not perfect of course, but saves hours of time and suggests ways of doing things that I didn't already know. It's also useful for outlining lectures for e.g. undergrads, or even MSc/PhD students. If you ask it to outline "10 lectures on introduction to using bioinformatics for public health microbiology" or "the role of the microbiome in colonisation resistance" I'd argue that it does a better job than most MSc or PhD students could do in a day or two of work. Again, you have to tweak it of course, but much better than starting from nothing.
2. Secondly, I'm not sure about the characterisation of what it is doing as plagiarism. Perhaps in a scientific way, where ideas have to be credited to their originator, then presenting the output of ChatGPT as your own work without any further reference would be bad practice, bordering on plagiarism. But, I don't think most people would do this. It's like wikipedia, can be very helpful, but you still need to dig into the primary sources for scientific purposes. Beyond science, I don't really think it's plagiarism anymore than a writer who writes in a similar style to another is plagiarising that person. If I ask you to write a song about malaria in the style of Dolly Parton (as I did with ChatGPT), and you do a good job (as ChatGPT did), then you're not plagiarising Dolly Parton are you?
Personally I can't imagine it being useful for writing any part of a scientific paper other than maybe the first couple of paragraphs of the introduction, and actually, I haven't found the copy editing that helpful either. I could imagine it being helpful for motivation statements for things, or pathway to impact statements and things like that though.
I'm so glad you're still reading! Thanks for your thoughtful critique.
1a. Agree there are more uses. My new favorite is "Hey AI, give me the name for the unifying concept between X, Y, and Z things." That's something that's very hard to Google but very easy to Bard (if I can use that as a verb).
1b. I've heard about people writing code, but the example that really struck me was writing code you would have no interest in reading or writing yourself. Like, "Hey AI, write me a Google Sheets API plugin that does XYZ." I hear about people using AI to write production code, but I'm not familiar with how it's getting combined with feedback cycles and testing suites.
2. Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work. (I copied that from Wiki.) As you point out, the details count. What precisely counts as in the style of Dolly Parton, and what counts as a rip-off that Dolly should get royalties on, depends on context and is a matter for lawyers. But I know that ChatGPT gives no citations. I guess I'm concerned that, if an artist believes that AI is going to read in all their work and produce knock-offs without attribution or royalties, then we will have less creative, human-made art.
Hi Scott,
Thought provoking post! I have a couple of thoughts:
1. When you say that ChatGPT is only good for rote copy editing, what else have you tried? Personally I think that it's coding is remarkably good. Not perfect of course, but saves hours of time and suggests ways of doing things that I didn't already know. It's also useful for outlining lectures for e.g. undergrads, or even MSc/PhD students. If you ask it to outline "10 lectures on introduction to using bioinformatics for public health microbiology" or "the role of the microbiome in colonisation resistance" I'd argue that it does a better job than most MSc or PhD students could do in a day or two of work. Again, you have to tweak it of course, but much better than starting from nothing.
2. Secondly, I'm not sure about the characterisation of what it is doing as plagiarism. Perhaps in a scientific way, where ideas have to be credited to their originator, then presenting the output of ChatGPT as your own work without any further reference would be bad practice, bordering on plagiarism. But, I don't think most people would do this. It's like wikipedia, can be very helpful, but you still need to dig into the primary sources for scientific purposes. Beyond science, I don't really think it's plagiarism anymore than a writer who writes in a similar style to another is plagiarising that person. If I ask you to write a song about malaria in the style of Dolly Parton (as I did with ChatGPT), and you do a good job (as ChatGPT did), then you're not plagiarising Dolly Parton are you?
Personally I can't imagine it being useful for writing any part of a scientific paper other than maybe the first couple of paragraphs of the introduction, and actually, I haven't found the copy editing that helpful either. I could imagine it being helpful for motivation statements for things, or pathway to impact statements and things like that though.
I'm so glad you're still reading! Thanks for your thoughtful critique.
1a. Agree there are more uses. My new favorite is "Hey AI, give me the name for the unifying concept between X, Y, and Z things." That's something that's very hard to Google but very easy to Bard (if I can use that as a verb).
1b. I've heard about people writing code, but the example that really struck me was writing code you would have no interest in reading or writing yourself. Like, "Hey AI, write me a Google Sheets API plugin that does XYZ." I hear about people using AI to write production code, but I'm not familiar with how it's getting combined with feedback cycles and testing suites.
2. Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work. (I copied that from Wiki.) As you point out, the details count. What precisely counts as in the style of Dolly Parton, and what counts as a rip-off that Dolly should get royalties on, depends on context and is a matter for lawyers. But I know that ChatGPT gives no citations. I guess I'm concerned that, if an artist believes that AI is going to read in all their work and produce knock-offs without attribution or royalties, then we will have less creative, human-made art.