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I have no idea about publishing or book writing or anything, so please enlighten me, but how much of that is plagiarism and how much of that is what would be called "fair use" in other domains? The post only refers to excerpts of long-winded descriptions of stuff, not to large plots or entire paragraphs plagiarized. Is that very different from asking ChatGPT to generate a thorough description of a situation and using…
I'm not really convinced by this or several other recent plagiarism scandals. I have some experience of using the automated tools and I think people get a false sense of confidence from them, both in the sense of "this was definately copied from X" (rather than a shared original source) and "this is morally wrong, because the computer said so". The example of the music description for example. It's obviously lifted f…
Writing isn't coding, this is not the same a just copying some snippet from stackoverflow.
But then again I'm not a writer or expert on this, so I don't know how serious this is compared to a thesis or something where this would already cost you your title.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds more serious. That's literally fraud, unlike taking random sentences you liked from other books, which is quite benign, in my opinion.
How is that fraud?
I still don't see how this is a crime though, I mean sure, he has a sense of inspiration and borrows sentences and phrases from somewhere. But, that doesn't mean the entire plots of his books, or the primary reason they sell is because of him stealing a few sentences from others.
1. How much of other people's work did Mark Dawson plagiarise in each of his books?
2. How much of other people's work would someone need to plagiarise before you consider it to be unethical?
We can't answer 1. just yet, but if you are going to make a judgement about him here, at least try to give your answer for 2. The first question is a question of fact and the second question is a question of subjectivity so it's important to separate them out.
If it wasn't for the dates I'd say that's LLM completion at play. If you think about copilot etc...that would produce the same pattern. Fragments being obviously matching existing work. Not sure I'd go quite as far as calling an author a plagiarist on the basis of specific short fragments matching. It would need bit more of an overarching say plotline matching or similar. Who here hasn't copied some code off stack ov…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a collage of flowery phrases taken from here and there. I don’t think it’s plagiarism, because it involves copying larger chunks than a convenient paragraph. Originality is the art of hiding your sources, which has become utterly impossible nowadays with the search engines. If he had studied after the 2010s, he would have paraphrased a bit more to confuse google
When I was in high school/university, they taught us that plagarism was taking even ideas and reusing them directly. Copying a sentence like that was an explicit example, even if generic. We were told that it gets suspicious at even 4 more complex words that are the same. Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism. Plagiarism, at least as presented to me, is a very strict standard.
Specially ideas. Which cannot be copyrighted (yet).
Somebody show cage Michael Tomasello right now. Open any of his books and you’ll see a series of self-plagiarism sentences.
I now think he’s just a genius because he’s investigated his field in depth
The reason they're not accusing them of copyright infringement is presumably that a few sentences allegedly lifted with modifications from other books won't rise to that level. Perhaps UK law is different, but presumably this is just something that might make you unpopular among other authors and literary critics, not a civil or criminal matter.
Related: the Norwegian press is now examining the theses of Norwegian ministers and politicians after a Twitter/x user found plagiarism in the Master's thesis of the Minister of Science - she had to go on the hour and may lose her degree. Other ministers are now being scrutinized So if any of you are journalists - this may be a way to get new scoops!
Did they find real plagiarism that was obviously fraudulent or did someone cite an author improperly. I know in academic circles it's basically the same, but some things I've seen recently accusing people of plagiarism are just draconian IMO like they cited the person, but screwed up the quotes somehow.
Can you provide an example of an incident like this?
I have really never understood how you can fall for people with how to get rich guides. Just do your own thing. Dont look at others too much. Rich wont make you happy anyway.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/14/the-bi...
(2023)
I’ve never understood why people on Hacker News feel the need to make these year comments? Particularly in cases like this where it adds nothing at all to the conversation. It has the air of indicating that the content is potentially outdated, but the post is quite little less than a month old. If the content was a couple days newer would there be value in commenting “(2024)”? Beyond that, everything on that page has…
(That person's comment was benign, in my opinion, because the mods are going to manually hide this subthread anyway—it's a minor and short-lived distraction. It's a pretty common interaction on HN: there's a meta-discussion about the HN submission itself, "please edit the title / please change the URL to this one / please whatever", and 'dang steps in and says "Thanks! Fixed", and then he kills the subthread because it's no longer relevant. I feel this status quo is basically okay?)
[0] Many examples, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=2023&dateStart=1704103200&date...