A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated Texts
Nafis Irtiza Tripto Saranya Venkatraman Dominik Macko Robert Moro Ivan Srba Adaku Uchendu Thai Le Dongwon Lee
In the realm of text manipulation and linguistic transformation, the question
of authorship has always been a subject of fascination and philosophical
inquiry. Much like the \textbf{Ship of Theseus paradox}, which ponders whether
a ship remains the same when each of its original planks is replaced, our
research delves into an intriguing question: \textit{Does a text retain its
original authorship when it undergoes numerous paraphrasing iterations?}
Specifically, since Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable
proficiency in the generation of both original content and the modification of
human-authored texts, a pivotal question emerges concerning the determination
of authorship in instances where LLMs or similar paraphrasing tools are
employed to rephrase the text. This inquiry revolves around \textit{whether
authorship should be attributed to the original human author or the AI-powered
tool, given the tool's independent capacity to produce text that closely
resembles human-generated content.} Therefore, we embark on a philosophical
voyage through the seas of language and authorship to unravel this intricate
puzzle.