This morning I've got a bad case of writer's block. "Write about anything", I keep telling myself. So I sit down at my desk and instead of thinking of what subject to write about, I click on the ChatGPT tab and entertain the idea of letting artificial intelligence do all the thinking, and typing for me. "That's lazy", or, "that's really a form of plagiarism" says my inner voice, and so here I am, writing directly out of my own mind, for you today. Here is what the search engine Google says about the matter:
"ChatGPT content is not plagiarism insofar as it is not copying the work of someone else outright. However, it is somewhat questionable from an academic integrity standpoint, in the sense that if you use an answer or essay generated by the chatbot, you have not created the work yourself."
And asking chat GPT about it:
"While I can provide assistance and generate text based on your instructions, it's important to use the generated content as a starting point and then add your own ideas, insights, and personal touch to it. This way, you'll be using the generated content as a tool for inspiration rather than a direct copy. "
There are two major reason why plagiarism against a human being is bad: it's a form of theft with legal consequences, and it's dishonest; a self-aggrandizing lie, if you will. However, if you "plagiarize" an AI program like ChatGPT, no one is harmed in any way. The lie, however, still remains. A new word needs to be coined to describe this sort of semi-plagiarism. It's a fraud, yes combined with laziness. Oh wait, there's the word charlatan: a person falsely claiming to have special knowledge and skill, a fraud.
Here is an article from Mozilla on the subject.
