AI’s Habit of Repackaging Ideas Without Credit

LLMs are celebrated as revolutionary, yet they operate by extracting and repackaging the work of millions of authors without credit. They plagiarize at three levels—words, style, and ideas—while providing value only because of the commons that humans built. Lawsuits, university policies, and open-source conflicts show this is not hypothetical but real. The solution is reciprocity: attribution, compensation, and reinvestment in the knowledge infrastructures that make synthesis possible.