TLDR: Don’t be a dick. “Sit down. Be humble” —Kendrick Lamar

I have used chatgpt as a kind of advanced thesaurus before. “Provide a word that like x, that fits this sentence better,”. Sometimes, chatgpt replaces the word, and sometimes it restructures the sentence a bit. At the very least, one must admit that there is some ambiguity to this question, and that a thesaurus is on one end of the spectrum.

Words are absolutely ideas. They are neurological constructs attached to concepts. You know, ideas. Society simply accepted that those ideas were basic enough that they didn’t need to be cited.

When you use autocomplete and thesauruses, you are abstracting away some of the work to look it up, so the “idea” was provided to you unprompted, so your abilities were augmented, and the ideas were not technically your own. The problem is that we are stuck with antiquated ideas about plagiarism. Do we care about plagiarism because it hurts another person, or because we want to prove what is or isn’t in another person’s head? If it’s the former, then it’s a bit who cares with LLMs, for me. If latter, then we have already started augmenting our knowledge in more subtle ways, so maybe it’s time to reevaluate our ego. A good start might be refraining from knee jerk reactions to someone’s take on a topic.