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Comment by howunfortunate | Hacker News Reader

This happens in academia all the time. You read a ton of papers, chat with tons of people about tons of ideas.

Later you come up some idea, you do the experiment, write the paper, search for relevant citations when you write the intro.

Honestly I think this is actually desirable. For a mind to work well and do things creatively and efficiently it can't be a simple search engine, it needs to blend and meld and reform the information.

And that means the output can't be cleanly deterministically linked to the input. Unless you just keep a log then cite everything you've ever read in your life (and all the conversations and talks too).

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> This happens in academia all the time. You read a ton of papers, chat with tons of people about tons of ideas. > > Later you come up some idea, you do the experiment, write the paper, search for relevant citations when you write the intro.

And your search includes papers mentioning the various ideas you heard about from those other people. They almost always publish _something_ about it, and in the rare cases they do not, you put them in the "thanks" section, describing which ideas they contributed to (or in very rare cases, cite an unpublished result/claim as "personal communication" from an author).

I was in academic for a number of years (Theoretical Comp Sci, then DB management systems architecture), and what I just described seems to have been the practice. It is of course possible that people neglected to cite the sources of some of their ideas, but not that I know of. The worst I could say is that several authors' work exhibited a similar approach and a person preferred to cite one of them rather than another.

This is the reason why this is desirable for humans. But I do not like extending excuses that apply to human (limitations) also to companies that could keep a log.

I think I explained poorly about the log.

The log is the training data. The impractical thing isn't keeping the log, it's including the log as citations. For an expert human, it'd be thousands of pages. For an LLM, you might as well just put "citation: all human language ever written".

This is a weak argument. Swarms of LLM agents have been regurgitating the work of academics and ruining their PhD work without attribution. It's not analogous to what you're describing.

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