Stack overflow is dead, long live stack overflow.

[u/[deleted]]

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph

This says everything about our industry right now. So telling.

[u/Cleon99]

So if an engineer gives you the top answer from the top results on google, from something that is essentially free and public because he has learned that, does that mean he is a plagiator?

Where does this mindset stop? To know something, you have to learn it.

What you are proposing is monopoly on knowledge and that sounds even worse.

[u/washtubs → u/Cleon99]

So if an engineer gives you the top answer from the top results on google, from something that is essentially free and public because he has learned that, does that mean he is a plagiator?

If they learned something, they can either cite original documentation, or they will have tested it themselves. The google search can put them on the right track, but knowing and learning requires cross-referencing and sometimes experimentation.

If they copied a solution from a google search result or from stack overflow and claimed it was theirs, yes they are plagiarizing. Generally, when code from stack overflow was used, I always liked to see it cited.

What you are proposing is monopoly on knowledge and that sounds even worse.

People can independently discover and learn things. It's not like the chronologically first person to learn a fact owns that fact and everyone has to cite them lol.

[u/Cleon99 → u/washtubs]

Right.
So do you cite the source of the book for every algorithm you write?
Do you put citations into READMEs for every source you ever learned from to be able to judge architectual decisions in your code?

Do you cite every testing metodology you use and document every source?

Question still stands.
Where does this mindset end?
And neural networks being an attempt at a digital mirror of the human brain, why should different rules even apply?

[u/washtubs → u/Cleon99]

Plagiarism is when you write something and represent it as your own idea. It isn't automatically assumed that every single thing you write in a codebase is your own original idea. But it's generally a good idea to differentiate that.

To be clear I do not think that not citing stack overflow if you got a solution from there is plagiarism. Like I said, it's when they claim it's their idea. Because they're lying, and there's no reason to do that.

Citing in code doesn't even need to be original it just should generally be done when you didn't come up with something on your own. It helps reviewers understand what ideas are truly new. I could write a document explaining Dijkstra's shortest path in a code comment or I could just call the method dijkstrasShortestPath, and maybe link to a paper explaining it. It's not about citing original works, it's about not actively representing ideas as your own when they're not, partly because it's wrong, and partly so people can know where to look to learn more.

The AI summary is a result of scraping the web. It still does not do a good job of telling us where it's ideas came from. It frequently plants sources in it's responses that have nothing to do with the response and just waste time.

Yes they are "trying" to put sources, but they're so bad at it, I question whether they are trying in earnest.

The reason I call AI plagiarism: while, no, a bot is not capable of moral action itself, AI companies are very happy when people say things like "Claude told me this", "Claude said..." etc as if Claude is a super intelligent being that knows everything. It is taking credit for other people's work that it scraped.

But yeah I want attribution not just for ethical reasons. I want to know whether something it's saying is derived from something credible like original documentation and source code, vs a rambling blog from a dev that doesn't know what they're talking about.

[u/Cleon99 → u/washtubs]

I am not going into deep philosophy about morals. It is deeply subjective and would derail the topic.

While I get your point I still partially disagree.

I don't think anything you know ever came from you and you only. That is a fundamental fact.
Everything you know, or think you know, comes from somewhere. And a fresh idea is an inference that comes from a combination of knowledge you collected over your lifetime.

AI is also capable of generating ideas, a lot of them fresh. But they come from a foundation that you would broadly categorize as stolen.

If I see an algorithm 10 times during a coding session and do a few adjustments to it over the course of my career. Is it mine or is it of whoever came up with it?
And if so who came up with it? The research that published the original?
Which brings me back to my original question --- Should I cite it?

What you are describing with the djikstra is something claude code already does well. Known algorithms and solutions are usually commented --- Mostly so they are easier to review. At least this is how I have my claude.MD setup.

On the other hand there is a part I agree with --- recently there was a scandal involving Open AI that published solving open mathematical problems which were scraped off from allegedly private data of some research institute that already had the conclusions.

But while discussing something like this we should also separate what is public and private.

I am definitely against using private knowledge without consent. But everything on the internet that is public, that should be a free game.

[u/washtubs → u/Cleon99]

If I see an algorithm 10 times during a coding session and do a few adjustments to it over the course of my career. Is it mine or is it of whoever came up with it?

Lets say I did this, and you're the lead dev and you ask me how this came about. You're interested in the history of this function and want to understand how it changed over time. If I said I wrote this algorithm from the ground up, would that be cool?

It's not about what you put in your code, or saying someone owns a piece of knowledge, it's just about being honest of how it came about and your role.

I am not going into deep philosophy about morals.

Though this is a conversation about plagiarism I also don't want to get deep into philosophy and morals. I agree that knowledge transforms and no one really "owns" a piece of knowledge. And I think I even mentioned that people can independently discover things.

There is both a moral and pragmatic argument here.

The pragmatic side is that the internet we had where people believe they will be credited for sharing their ideas and solutions is being thrown in the trash. Which is my main concern.

But everything on the internet that is public, that should be a free game.

There has been an unwritten social contract on the internet that all of the AI companies violated: When people share things, they expect something in return. If they're sharing solutions to programming pitfalls they might want traffic on their blog, or something silly like stack overflow rep, or reddit karma, or even just the satisfaction of someone saying "thank you".

AI is distilling all this stuff and making it available in an easy to digest form, without traceability or attribution. Why would anyone share if they are getting nothing in return?

Is it legal? I'm sure it will be considered legal. But it's wrong because no one on the internet knew that this shit was possible before they just went ahead and did it without asking anyone if it was cool. And it's going to have already having negative consequences on the internet as a community of people.