Cheating against bot in a casual game?

Recently I saw a user soy650 cheating against LeelaChess. When I confronted him, he got rude and said that cheating was acceptable against a bot in a casual game but didn't specify the source of his claim. So I am asking the community, is what he did was right or should I report him.

well, i know cheaters can still play casual games even after they got caught. they are only banned from rated ones.

If it's not a rated game then I don't think 'cheating' matters too much against a Bot.

On FICS (free internet chess server), you can run an engine if you don't log in as a registered user, so there is a sort of "anything goes" approach to unregistered users there. There's a certain similarity between unregistered and unrated games.

If someone is running a Leela Bot on here there is a good chance that they are using it for Leela to learn to play chess as well as possible so consultation of opening books, use of engines, use of endgame table bases, etc are only like to help improve Leela rather than hinder.

Worse than cheating would be to constantly play like a Patzer and teach Leela that bringing her queen out early will likely lead to a win. Neural networks are trained to learn what works most of the time and I believe that seeing too many patzer games would be counter-productive.

I heard a story of a neural network that was trained with pictures of American and Russian tanks in order to tell the difference. Unfortunately the pictures of one type were taken on a cloudy day and the others on a clear day. When they tried out the neural network on pictures it hadn't seen before it didn't do well. When they analyzed what had gone wrong, they realized they had programmed a neural network to tell whether it was a nice day!

@Sidonia-ChessEngine Leela doesn't get trained with the lichess games though. They are just "for fun". (and to improve the visibility of the leela project I guess)

Besides, AFAIK you are allowed to use an engine in a casual game if your opponent is ok with it. In this case it's kind of hard to ask a bot whether it's ok with it, you could ask the bot handler though.

@Sidonia-ChessEngine @VertSangBleu @Vetinari_Computer Just now I found out that the said user asked the same question https://lichess.org/qa/6222/using-an-engine-versus-bot-eg-leela and moderator have a quite unequivocal opinion on that. Just thought I let you guys know about it.

From the question above... "he got rude and said that cheating was acceptable against a bot in a casual game" .. note the word "Casual".
From the link above ... "No use of outside assistance in rated games ever" .. note the word rated.

In a rated game, any assistance at all is cheating, as your rating is intended to reflect your ability. In casual games things should be more lax. For example a great player might be learning a new opening and not want his rating affected by the ensuing bad games. Or two players might be analyzing an opening together and both agree that they will use engines to help each other find the best lines. This happened between me (the engine author) and another player when I said the Traxler Counter Gambit that he played is a theoretical loss even though it's very sharp and dangerous and often winning for black. We both agreed engine use was okay and we played unrated.

In CASUAL games against an engine it's not really possible to ask the opponent if he minds you having assistance. Since the game is not rated I don't think there is any great harm done. (A human might get upset at you using an engine without their knowing. Engines do not get upset.)

That is however my personal opinion and may differ widely from Lichess policy.

https://lichess.org/@/Sidonia-ChessEngine