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Plagiarism
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When I saw the thread title I was expecting something about copying code or wiki styles or something, but copying descriptions and actual creative text from people? Jesus.
The idea is that one expresses themselves through writing… if you can’t or won’t do that, then what’s the fucking point?
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Plagiarism is when you copy someone else’s writing as your own without permission, so using a desc that a friend wrote for you wouldn’t count.
I also think phrases or a particular (brief!) way of describing something usually wouldn’t count. These things tend to go in and out of style among friend groups or games and feels more like the adopted slang than ripping someone off.
Blatantly using entire descs, event descs or scene sets or backgrounds or anything else where you’ve just copied what someone else did and not citing where the writing came from? Is plagiarism, and I’d support banning anyone who did it.
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@Nilli said in Plagiarism:
Plagiarism is when you copy someone else’s writing as your own without permission
Oof, let’s not go down this rabbit hole again.
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@Pavel I’m not aware of a prior discussion here, I was just thinking of cases like ghostwriters or the above example of Tez writing descs for friends.
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@Nilli There was a rather strong discussion about plagiarism previously, along with several different(ish) definitions.
I also abhor ghostwriters - the practice of using them, not the writers themselves.
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@Pavel Ahh I missed that one. I’m not trying to say I have the one correct definition here, just that if I wrote a description and said you could use it and you then used it, I wouldn’t call that plagiarism.
I see enough examples of the more blatant variety anyway that’s honestly shocking. It seems like most of us are thirty-somethings who have been RPing for 47 years and should know better than to be straight up copy/pasting other people’s work.
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@Nilli Oh, for sure, but you know how this group gets. Semantics.
I hate writing descs, but I’d rather use ChatGPT to cobble something together rather than wholesale take a desc someone else wrote.
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@Tez said in Plagiarism:
What would you do?
I think the response to any crime should be primarily determined by the injured party, but my instinct without knowing what the affected person thinks? Ban. If that’s the level of instinctual disrespect you have for the other contributors on a game, then I do not have high hopes for the behaviors I don’t yet know about.
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@GF said in Plagiarism:
@Tez said in Plagiarism:
What would you do?
I think the response to any crime should be primarily determined by the injured party, but my instinct without knowing what the affected person thinks? Ban. If that’s the level of instinctual disrespect you have for the other contributors on a game, then I do not have high hopes for the behaviors I don’t yet know about.
Though I normally hate banning as a first-instance reaction, I entirely agree. If you’re going to lie about something as pointless as a desc, what else are you going to lie about?
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Yeah. My first impulse was ban as well, but sometimes it is difficult to measure if your response is PROPORTIONATE when you are blinded by the light of FRIEND JUSTICE. I was also just fucking flabbergasted by how bold they were to just copy the whole damn thing. Like – for real? For real for real?
We’ve seen people stealing game code, wiki code, policy files – mine have been stolen twice!, and other general out of character content multiple times across the hobby. The guilty parties always look, you know, guilty, but there is something about the blatant disrespect and lack of creativity in stealing someone’s whole description that just baffles me. It’s just so weird. It’s so weird, guys. I am dying to know why you would do that.
she/they
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@Tez said in Plagiarism:
sometimes it is difficult to measure if your response is PROPORTIONATE
There’s no firepower like overwhelming firepower.
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@mietze said in Plagiarism:
I mean fuck now you can use ai for a base and edit. There’s no excuse. I know I would have a hard time respecting a player who did this. Especially so stupidly on another game in the same genre. Its just gross.
You shouldn’t need a policy to know this is a lame ass thing to do.
We actually wrote up a specific AI policy (tldr: we refuse to use it for anything including images, players are not permitted to use any language machine model but may use it for images if they want) because of its burgeoning use in the MUSH world, but never would have thought we’d need to include a plagiarism policy.
If it were me, I’d just chalk this up to Artificial Non-Intelligence and not even using a language model, and probably ban them outright. Not only is it unethical, but as others said, it betrays a fundamental lack of creativity that makes me doubt whether they would be a contributing member of our storytelling community.
I was thinking about this more and more since last night, and went from it being irksome to feeling like it is a real violation of the heart and soul that I would pour into a character. And there’s just no excuse for it, really.
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Odd question about plagiarism. I know plagiarism of descs and even whole characters has happened before in the hobby, but has anyone ever attempted to plagiarize a plot or PRP before?
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@MisterBoring said in Plagiarism:
Odd question about plagiarism. I know plagiarism of descs and even whole characters has happened before in the hobby, but has anyone ever attempted to plagiarize a plot or PRP before?
I’m sure it’s happened, but I think also when you are talking about PLOTS and such, so much is really just boiled down, whether it’s Joseph Campbell or Aristotle, to “the same stories we keep retelling”, that you get into a situation where it’s not necessarily plagiarism per se, it’s just telling a story that has been told before, elsewhere.
I mean, how many tv shows and movies have told the same story as Groundhog Day? Even GROUNDHOG DAY wasn’t the first use of the Groundhog Day story.
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Oh sure, plenty of plots at a certain level are derivative or otherwise copied from others. I’m wondering if someone attempted to introduce the same NPCs, mcguffins and events, like, down to the letter as someone else’s plot.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring said in Plagiarism:
Oh sure, plenty of plots at a certain level are derivative or otherwise copied from others. I’m wondering if someone attempted to introduce the same NPCs, mcguffins and events, like, down to the letter as someone else’s plot.
I have definitely seen STers recycle the exact same plot, shoehorned into another game’s theme, that they ran elsewhere. I’ll say that much.
And I HAVE seen people run their own versions of plots I’ve run, which I take as flattering. Although I’ll bet if push came to shove, someone could find some place before me (a movie, a show, a book, etc) that ran that plot before I did.
Although, I did once see someone use one of my PCs as an NPC in a plotline at another game once. That was kind of trippy. But they hadn’t wholesale copied the desc, so…
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@MisterBoring When I was looking at the history of plagiarism in the hobby, I saw someone trying to copy and paste someone’s entire NPC court structure. I think someone lifted @Coin’s npcs actually. Not plot beats or anything, but NPC structures.
she/they
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I have had two major experiences with plagiarism/theft and both of them were completely and utterly infuriating.
In one case, when I was playing on a WoD mage game many moons ago, someone stole my entire wiki page, swapped out maybe three or four sentences on the whole page, and plunked in (some) new pictures. We’re talking the CSS, the color, the layout, the writing, everything – including some images that were icons for specific subsplats that this new person didn’t belong to but didn’t recognize and was too stupid to remove. The amazing thing was that when I confronted her about this and pointed out that her wiki page history showed that, when created, it still had my character’s own name in the content, first she a) denied that she had taken any of my work and then b) insisted this was fine because the site wiki had templates. Which it did. But my writing, my graphics, and my custom code are not. So theft, and then outright lying to my face.
I experienced something similar when someone I’d brought on to staff BSG: Orion after Dropkick left lifted our entire database to help one of the former staffers build BSG: Deimos. Now, as it was explained to me when I started on that game, the BSG games had a tradition of passing on a lot of work from one game runner to the next, so most of that was totally fine. But I was also under the impression that they did so after talking to the previous staff and did not do things like port in room descriptions, unique mechanics that hadn’t existed on other iterations, etc. – all of which BSG: Deimos did. And when I confronted one of their staffers about it, they once again claimed that they hadn’t taken anything, all of this was passed from game to game to game, and which I knew for a fact wasn’t true because I was the one who wrote some of those things, as well as several other new things that had been created by staffers that weren’t around, weren’t consulted about reuse, and blatantly had their work taken. That really upset me because I felt like not only had my work been taken, but that I had let them down by trusting the coder I’d brought on.
In both cases, the thing I found to be beyond the pale wasn’t even the theft. It was the blatantly lying to my face about it. If you’re going to be an unrepentant asshole about stealing other people’s work, at least own it. Own something that is actually yours, even if it’s just your shitty actions and attitudes.
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@MisterBoring said in Plagiarism:
Oh sure, plenty of plots at a certain level are derivative or otherwise copied from others. I’m wondering if someone attempted to introduce the same NPCs, mcguffins and events, like, down to the letter as someone else’s plot.
Not another member of our community, but I did wholesale rip off the haunted mansion mission from VTM:Bloodlines for a plot once…
