I for one am still baffled at just how OpenAI/Anthropic and the likes have gotten away with the biggest copyright infringements (or perhaps IP-theft, I'm not sure what the correct term is) in history (the data collection for training) without any legal ramifications.

Even if it turns out to be perfectly legal I think a "retreat" to this position of LLM generation being Plagiarism (and therefore being uninteresting and morally bad) is quite a reasonable action.

It also separates LLMs for searching through documents quite nicely from content generation which since I would be hard pressed to consider a "fuzzy search" as a form of plagiarism.

A lot of artists are doing mix and match and they're fine because it's framed as artistic interpretation. Can the author point to examples of LLMs reproducing some original work without being explicitly asked to do so? If not, what's the argument?

I read the source code and like some patterns that I reuse in my later works. Is that plagiarism? If not, what's the difference with LLMs in this sense?

'Plagiarism' is an overreach. An LLM works a lot like the human brain does in terms of how it gathers its ideas for what to output, just like people do. When you write or create art, your ideas are a synthesis of everything you've experienced externally, directed and focused by the context of what it is you are looking to create/output. Nothing in your head is more original than what an LLM might produce. If you hadn't listened to music composed by other composers for most of your life you wouldn't be able to generate a new composition and neither would an LLM. Are you plagiarizing when you write a new composition because you listened to famous composers and practically memorized their music over your training run (your life)? I'd say no. Plagiarism is more like the intentional act of copying work instead of doing your own synthesis.

Is a painter who was trained on Van Gogh or Salvador Dali plagiarising those artists when their own work shows influences of their work? Meh, I dont think so

Is Greta Van Fleet plagiarising Led Zepplin? Some would say so out of distaste but it's not an actual fact.