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Plagiarism
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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…
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@Tez said in Plagiarism:
@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.
It was some other CofD game that basically copied all my sphere pages, yeah. Literally my theme stuff too.
ETA: I just checked. It was basically the Vampire and werewolf page, the House Rules, the Influence page, the Pure/Forsaken treaty write-up, etc. Some dude left Eldritch (my game) and decided to plagiarize stuff for some other CofD game that was opening. I never figured out exactly who it was, unfortunately.
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I keep reaching for a cogent thought about this but everything I want to post boils down to: “I cannot believe how dumb this person was and how pointless this was.”
Nobody would’ve cared if they’d written a bad desc or placeholder desc or used an AI to generate their desc. What was even the point? I put Lucian’s RP hooks through an AI detector and they pinged as generated, so it’s not like the player wasn’t probably doing that to a degree/had something against that. Why…this? I guess ‘insecurity’ but…gosh, what a dumb thing to potentially get yourself booted from a game over.
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As a gamerunner, I would give someone plagiarizing someone exactly one chance to explain themselves (and change the text in question). If I didn’t like the explanation, or they refused to change it? Believe it or not, straight to ban. If they had an explanation that sounded reasonable and matched up with what the plagiarized person had experienced, I would consider the plagiarist to have used their one strike that they were going to get, and watch them closely the rest of their time on the game.
As a player, if a game plagiarized another game… I’m just not going to play there as soon as I find out. I am going to go with @Nilli 's description of plagiarization, because I’ve used ideas from other folks either with attributation or with permission and attributation, and I’ve given folks permission to use ideas/text of mine, and I find both of those just fine. If someone has written policy/concepts the way you want it, and they’re okay with you using it/tweaking it/etc… I don’t have a problem with that.
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Ripping off entire games or theme files is a different animal than the plagiarism that started this thread. I remember when that Arx-ripoff had all of their theme files. And if I recall correctly, it was revealed that Neitherlands took their theme files directly from a game that didn’t get off the ground. I mean, I’ve been staff on games where disgruntled players popped up with a new mu thematically very similar to ours. At the time, it felt a lot like what we’re talking about, now.
re: the ripped desc. I know we have a lot of educators in our hobby, and I’m inclined to look at things through that lens, and offer a little more grace. Coming out of the pandemic (read: still being in the pandemic) and with this AI bullshit, there’s what feels like a lot more of this going around. Granted, this wasn’t my creative work, so I can’t say how to feel about it. But it seems to me like a stupid, lazy, low-stakes, self-sabotage type of mistake done without malice.
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I’ve had a whole concept and creation ripped off. The only thing they changed was the name. Imagine my surprise when I created a new character only to run into myself, a character still active on another mush…
It was so similar that it could only have been a staffer from the other mush…
I asked why she had my bit. She said she just really liked it…
Really soured Cajun N. for me.
