Comment by weevil

I feel like you're giving certain entities too much credit there. Yes text is generated to do _something_, but it may not be to communicate in good-faith; it could be keyword-dense gibberish designed to attract unsuspecting search engine users for click revenue, or generate political misinformation disseminated to a network of independent-looking "news" websites, or pump certain areas with so much noise and nonsense information that those spaces cannot sustain any kind of meaningful human conversation.

The issue with generative 'AI' isn't that they generate text, it's that they can (and are) used to generate high-volume low-cost nonsense at a scale no human could ever achieve without them.

> Life’s too short to go through it hating others

Only when they don't deserve it. I have my doubts about Google, but I've no love for OpenAI.

> Plagiarism has a particular definition ... no-one is required to append a statement crediting every text he has ever read

Of course they aren't, because we rightly treat humans learning to communicate differently from training computer code to predict words in a sentence and pass it off as natural language with intent behind it. Musicians usually pay royalties to those whose songs they sample, but authors don't pay royalties to other authors whose work inspired them to construct their own stories maybe using similar concepts. There's a line there somewhere; falsely equating plagiarism and inspiration (or natural language learning in humans) misses the point.