Posts tagged "plagiarism"
Making the Plagiarism Machine Write Code Still Counts as Plagiarism
Wed 27 May 2026
I have been struggling to put into words my frustration with the open source community in failing to meet the present moment.
In case you've missed the last three years: AI labs have strip-mined the internet, robbing creators of their work and selling it back to the public as a machine designed to crush labour. Thanks to their relentless lobbying of businesses and governments, there is immense pressure on workers to offload their cognition onto AI products backed by a Large Language Model, on the false pretense that the model is a reliable source of knowledge.
(For avoidance of doubt, a reliable source of knowledge doesn't habitually make fraudulent citations, and doesn't invent answers then spout them off with 100% confidence. These behaviours are referred to as hallucination; a problem which researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic admit is intrinsic of LLMs and essentially not fixable.)
It is no surprise that AI's biggest success story to date has been in computer programming, a field where a lot of people have no professional standards and are allergic to solidarity. A lot of attention has been paid to new projects that have embraced vibe coding; usually for their oafish levels of complexity, repetition and serious design flaws. Less attention has been paid to established open-source projects, where in an attempt to avoid corporate pressure or alienating key contributors, some level of LLM-driven development has been accepted.
Everywhere I look, there are big projects opening the door to LLM-generated code submissions. The Linux kernel. systemd. Kubernetes. Firefox. Python. Rust. Even ScummVM, a project I contribute to, has added such a policy. All perhaps motivated by different reasons, but collectively they provide a broad social license to ignore all ethical concerns and normalise the presence of LLM code generation.
I wish I was shocked at the lack of a visible resistance movement in this space as there has been with writing and visual arts, but that would be in denial of the extreme free-market libertarianism that has dominated software/the tech sector for the last 50 years. There has always been a level of dry rot visible from space, and now we get to watch part of the house collapse from its own weight.