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Don't credit the LLM

isaacsu.com

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Re: Don't credit the LLM

#21

Post by philipswood »

My read:

Isaac Su seems to be irritated and mildly triggered that people don't think or act like LLMs aren't just dumb, mute, simple tools.

Instead of talking about THAT, he is doing a weird combination strawman/bikeshed-like post about the different imagined, nuanced reasons why he imagines people credit LLM input in attribution.

A more honest take would be:

"Some of you are ascribing more sentience and agency to LLMs than I feel comfortable with. Stop doing that. I'm obviously and fundamentally right that they are dumb tools that can never threaten my intellectual and emotional security or human superiority."

Whether they are right or wrong — one reason that many people are giving credit is that they feel that (at some at level at least) that Claude/DeepSeek/Gemini/etc. is acting enough like a participant or partner to deserve being given credit.

Re: Don't credit the LLM

#22

Post by skybrian »

You should cite your sources, and that might include an LLM.

If you use AI chat as a search tool and then read whatever web pages it finds to check them for yourself (as you should), then you can cite that instead.

Citing an LLM is a sign that you couldn't be bothered to do that, but at least it's honest.

Re: Don't credit the LLM

#23

Post by antihipocrat »

WCSTombs wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Re: Don't credit the LLM

#24

Post by DrewADesign »

> Odd. Like a writer disclosing the spellchecker they used alongside every piece,

No it’s not. A spell checker tells me if I misspelled any of my own words.:!it doesn’t write for me.

> or a pilot announcing their version of avionics software over the PA while taxiing to the runway.

No, it’s nothing at all like those things. It would be more like your pilot letting Claude direct his taxiing.

People disclose LLM involvement because they know they didn’t really* author that output, and they want to disavow responsibility for it being totally wrong. Even if I just need a quick figure and I google it, I still disclose that I googled it rather than pulling it out of my own expertise.

Re: Don't credit the LLM

#25

Post by voidhorse »

nlawalker wrote: post #12

It’s #3, it’s a disclaimer, you’re helpful if it’s right and not to blame if it’s wrong. When I see it, it always makes me want to respond “weird, I asked Claude too and it said ”.

#3 just means the person is going to stop asking you when they realize that:

a. You bring no expertise beyond asking an LLm for the answer. b. They can just do that themselves.

If someone is asking you something and you tell them "this is what the LLM said" you're doing it wrong. If they are asking you they assume you possess some kind of acumen you can use to do better than they can blindly following an LLM and if you can't, well, why are you even involved in this interaction?

Re: Don't credit the LLM

#26

Post by chias »

There is a difference between crediting the LLM (which i agree is silly) and disclosing the use of an LLM, which I think is important. The author seems to conflate these two.

A disclosure is appropriate whenever the reader might feel differently about the result of armed with this information. For example, "this research on the non-addictive nature of tobacco, funded by the tobacco industry".

Moreover, not citing the LLM is plagiarism. Maybe people outside academia have an oddly narrow understanding of plagiarism, and (for example) cannot understand how it is possible to plagiarize yourself. It is hard to explain the importance of citing LLM contributions to people with this view.

Re: Don't credit the LLM

#27

Post by JodieBenitez »

voidhorse wrote: post #8

I completely agree. All crediting LLMs does is give the companies that built them precisely the kind of ego stroking feedback they want. I bet Dario giggles with excitement every time he sees "Claude" as the author of a git commit. People are feeding directly into y heir narrative that these tools are not tools but somehow replacements for human beings. You piloted the LLM, you are responsible for the code. I don't s…

Yes, it just a way to remove responsibility in case of problem. Very bad attitude. Whether the code comes from an autocomplete, a LLM, the documentation, a Stack Overflow response or has been 100% typed with your fingers doesn't matter: you're the one in charge.

Re: Don't credit the LLM

#28

Post by Morizero »

Including AI contributions in your work is curation of its outputs. Should a museum or gallery pretend the works in their exhibits were made by them? Of course not. Cite where you got things from.

Re: Don't credit the LLM

#29

Post by JodieBenitez »

Driver4732 wrote: post #9

I'm always skeptical of a recommendation to a technical problem when someone tells me they used an LLM chatbot like CoPilot. They really are just slot machines. Sometimes the answer works. Sometimes it doesn't. On the other hand, when someone tells me they googled it and found an article - not that AI overview crap - I trust it more because I know it was written and tested by a human.

"Googling" is pretty dead to me. Frontier model agents give much better, tailored to your case, answers. And it's faster. And there's no ads.

Re: Don't credit the LLM

#30

Post by yuliyp »

An LLM is not me. It is capable of doing more "work" but it also doesn't have my mental models and experience. My colleagues know roughly my areas of expertise. If I say "I think that X is happening" they'll assume that is the result of my expertise being applied and react accordingly. If I say "[LLM] thinks X is happening" they'll react differently and I want them to. Just like I might say "I suspect X is happening because Y" or "X is definitely happening" when I want to modulate their trust in what I'm saying.
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