I don't think "judge writing by its quality instead of its source" is coherent. Certainly, the value of reading is in the thoughts it produces in the reader's mind. So if you want me to ignore the source, you're asking me to value the thoughts I get from the writing without regard for the thoughts that produced it. This seems dubious, if not actually oxymoronic. As a reader, it feels much like you telling me to eat something you made, which you enthusiastically assure me is high quality, but which you can't be bothered to eat yourself, and in fact you've never eaten anything like it before. Plus it smells like spray-cheese.
> you're asking me to value the thoughts I get from the writing without regard for the thoughts that produced it. This seems dubious, if not actually oxymoronic
The archaeological record is loaded with texts of dubious or unknown authorship. Many of our oldest classical texts fall into this category [1].
That doesn't make them "oxymoronic" to engage with. Just more difficult. From a time when few were writing and fewer of their works survived, this is worth the effort. When a nickel of electricity can produce text, it's not–we need the filter of authorship to decide how much effort we, as humans, should expend in engaging.
Are you trying to argue that archeological texts weren't written by humans? Because otherwise I don't understand how your comment is related to the parent comment. It has nothing to do with not knowing the identity of the author. It's about the author being a human.
In Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" we learn that Menard, the fictional 20th century writer of the eponymous titles, immerses himself in the language and culture of 16th century Spain (pre-1602, to be precise), to the point where he writes a chapters of a book which are word-for-word identical parts of Don Quixote.
Yet the literary criticism of Borges's short story points out how the two texts have different messages.
For Cervantes, this is a book for the people, written in the language of the people.
For Menard, this is a book for specialists, who would understand the old Spanish language.
In the 20th century of Bertrand Russell and William James, the philosophical concepts that an educated writer like Menard would know are far different than 16th century Spain, so an expression like "history, the mother of truth" has different meanings.
Since you mention Homer, if I were to write of the wine-dark sea you would know I am referring to Homer. It brings along cultural connections, including its own Wikipedia page.
While when Homer uses it, it doesn't have those connections.
> New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of New England, which focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors, taking this approach under the influence of nineteenth-century German scholarship. The New Critics felt that this approach tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. ...
> It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were "uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature."
Borges's story is a commentary about this debate.
While the linked-to essay in the Chronicle made no mention of the long discussion of the relevant literary theories, seemingly insisting that analytical writing somehow stands outside that discussion.
...I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me? The identity of the author is not germane to my point, only whether there actually is an author, aka an actual mind. You could argue those old texts are worth engaging with exactly because they're our only links to those minds.
Ok, but when you're reading Homer or Socrates or the Bible (we're relatively sure it has several different authors), you're still engaging with a communal tradition of fellow readers who, in large part, define what it actually means to understand the text. If you read the Odyssey and decide it was actually about Pokemon, you're misreading it.
> you're still engaging with a communal tradition of fellow readers
Inasmuch as you’re reading translations upon translations, sure. But none of that is necessary.
> If you read the Odyssey and decide it was actually about Pokemon, you're misreading it
If you can stand by your reading based on the text, I say go for it. It doesn’t work in your example. But there are plenty of cases where what was once an against-the-grain interpretation dived into and out of the mainstream.
Me. Because I used to love reviewing conference papers and AI has utterly ruined it.
If the end result was reliably good people wouldn't be hating on it, but the vast majority of people are using AI not to elevate their output quality, but to churn out slop quantity, because that's where the incentives push them.
Anyone who actually engages with the output can tell that the speedups you get on producing good prose, maintainable codebases or high quality abstractions are much much less because you can't let the LLM go brrr, so AI output tends to be drivel, and banning it is a good way to prefilter.
It'd the same reason journals and conferences desk reject you if you don't follow their formating rules or don't use their template - it's a price of admission that ensures some consistent quality level, and if you couldn't be bothered to learn how to follow the rules, why should we trust you that the content is worth out time?
Many people here complain that AI writing is bad. And I agree with it, AI writing is boring and its distinctive tone is now associated with unpleasant thoughts for most people including me.
But I'm curious about how people will feel when AI writing is good and impossible to differentiate from a decent journalist-level writer, including with tooling. Then what? Are people going to stop reading?
I'm trying to separate the part of the argument related to "this writing is bad" from "this was written by AI".
I personally don't care if AI is a writing instrument for a human who's signing off on the content, as long as the writing is good and the source is legitimate.
The fundamental problem with most AI "writing" is that writing is a communication medium, and if your text was just generated by a prompt, I would always rather read the prompt than the output, as the output contains zero additional bits of information.
I don't want to see the peer review process (which can be weak enough as it is) overwhelmed by a flood of slop. I don't want reviewers to have to suffer reading AI's bad writing either.
If AI wrote it, it's not your voice. If you can't communicate your thoughts then it reflects a lack of clarity on you as the author. If you lack the clarity, AI assisted anything is probably part of the problem.
If connecting with the audience and guiding them to understand your thoughts is irrelevant, then you are missing the point of writing and being an academic.
There is a reason AI slop is revolting to read. It doesn't care.
"Because I was first trained as a mathematician, I probably write more like an AI than most people. But that particular article had been through 10 drafts. I worked on it with Claude Fable 5.1 and other large language models, as I now work on nearly everything, but I reviewed every line and rewrote most of them. By draft 10, I could not have said where the machine’s contribution stopped and mine began.?"
...
"The author drafted this essay in extended collaboration with Claude Fable 5.1."
-----------------
If you read a lot of journal articles, you're probably accustomed to occasionally running into articles a ways outside your bailiwick that are written poorly, you don't really understand, which you suspect made it past reviewers who didn't really understand it, and indeed, you suspect the author didn't really understand it either. Everyone involved just gave them the benefit of the doubt because they were too busy to figure out what the tortured language really meant. However, you don't know for sure, so you decide to leave it up to people in that particular field to deal with.
I can't speak for others, but I find AI writing to be frequently similar in its effect on me to bad writing. Yes, the grammar is correct, but it beats around the bush and puts emphasis on the wrong things. Even if you filter Claude through a human, those poor choices tend to shine through. This subtly inhuman voice switches your brain off. I suspect a lot of bad science is going to slip past reviewers because of LLM writing, and a lot of good science is going to slip past those who might need to read it, because the LLM co-written article switched their brains off and failed to make itself understood.
I understand the notion that, if the content is good enough, it shouldn't matter if the article is written poorly or co-written with AI. However, if the content is good enough, isn't it worth communicating it well?
Good point about emphasis. Correctness in emphasis, and I do mean correctness, was already underrated. It's a critical measure of whether you actually understand a topic, and an indicator of values in general.
I am on two program committees for major CS conferences this year.
LLM writing is horrible, full stop. The vast majority of papers that I see with obvious LLM writing ticks are also frankly incomprehesible. Claude's biggest sin at the moment is inventing new terminology (sometimes multiple times in a single sentence!) without stopping to explain what it means.
In previous years, I would see a substantial fraction (maybe 30-50%) of papers that were obviously written by non-native English speakers, and full of grammatical mistakes and typos. I have seen zero papers like that this year. Honestly, I preferred those: reading LLM writing is painful by comparison.
So far I have seen exactly one paper that had obvious LLM writing ticks, and yet had gone through enough passes (either of the LLM or the human authors) that the paper itself was comprehensible. So I'll admit that it's possible to do. But based on what I've seen this is vastly in the minority.
I honestly used to enjoy the review process; even when the papers were bad at least I could usually see the effort that went into it and give some constructive guidance on how to improve. The process is dramatically less pleasant now, and it's not obvious if I'm accomplishing anything: if authors who write with LLMs just stick the reviews back into those same LLMs, will they learn anything? I suspect not.
Maybe some day LLMs will be good enough to write, but as of today: please, please, just don't do it. The typos and grammatical mistakes are easier to read than the slop.
To be honest, people overvalue human writing too much. Even in academic research, there were quite a lot of cases where the writing was strange. I actually think AI writing is more readable, to that extent. People sometimes compare AI writing with the very best of human writing, but considering that AI writing is above average, I think it’s readable enough.
I'm fine with using AI for code, where the quality will likely be better than those of academics.
But writing.. FFS everything I see is just AI slop. And I only realize when I start wondering why the paper is going and going and saying nothing, and then pangram tells me that everything past the intro is just AI. :/
The glass half full take is that we are very lucky that there is some much literature that pre-dates LLMs. Our brains are tuned to enjoy that more. People who grow up with LLM slop from the start won't necessarily see it the same way.
Yup. I can read novels from the 1st century [1] or from the 19th century [2] or from the 1970s [3] for the rest of my life (well, until they get banned).
I care more if work is reproducible. Most academics articles are "trust me bro, I am scientist", no source data, no scripts used to process them. With AI I would expect publication of prompts and harness settings.
The archaeological record is loaded with texts of dubious or unknown authorship. Many of our oldest classical texts fall into this category [1].
That doesn't make them "oxymoronic" to engage with. Just more difficult. From a time when few were writing and fewer of their works survived, this is worth the effort. When a nickel of electricity can produce text, it's not–we need the filter of authorship to decide how much effort we, as humans, should expend in engaging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer#Biography,_identity,_and...
Yet the literary criticism of Borges's short story points out how the two texts have different messages.
For Cervantes, this is a book for the people, written in the language of the people.
For Menard, this is a book for specialists, who would understand the old Spanish language.
In the 20th century of Bertrand Russell and William James, the philosophical concepts that an educated writer like Menard would know are far different than 16th century Spain, so an expression like "history, the mother of truth" has different meanings.
Since you mention Homer, if I were to write of the wine-dark sea you would know I am referring to Homer. It brings along cultural connections, including its own Wikipedia page.
While when Homer uses it, it doesn't have those connections.
The idea that a text stands alone is a formalist style known as New Criticism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism .
> New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of New England, which focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors, taking this approach under the influence of nineteenth-century German scholarship. The New Critics felt that this approach tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. ...
> It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were "uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature."
Borges's story is a commentary about this debate.
While the linked-to essay in the Chronicle made no mention of the long discussion of the relevant literary theories, seemingly insisting that analytical writing somehow stands outside that discussion.
The mind is long dead. In Cartesian form, we assume it existed. But it may not be, as with Homer, a single mind. We know it didn’t even think like us.
One can engage with text on its own. Even find meaning in it. Being unable and refusing to are separate categories.
Inasmuch as you’re reading translations upon translations, sure. But none of that is necessary.
> If you read the Odyssey and decide it was actually about Pokemon, you're misreading it
If you can stand by your reading based on the text, I say go for it. It doesn’t work in your example. But there are plenty of cases where what was once an against-the-grain interpretation dived into and out of the mainstream.
If the end result was reliably good people wouldn't be hating on it, but the vast majority of people are using AI not to elevate their output quality, but to churn out slop quantity, because that's where the incentives push them.
Anyone who actually engages with the output can tell that the speedups you get on producing good prose, maintainable codebases or high quality abstractions are much much less because you can't let the LLM go brrr, so AI output tends to be drivel, and banning it is a good way to prefilter.
It'd the same reason journals and conferences desk reject you if you don't follow their formating rules or don't use their template - it's a price of admission that ensures some consistent quality level, and if you couldn't be bothered to learn how to follow the rules, why should we trust you that the content is worth out time?
But I'm curious about how people will feel when AI writing is good and impossible to differentiate from a decent journalist-level writer, including with tooling. Then what? Are people going to stop reading?
I'm trying to separate the part of the argument related to "this writing is bad" from "this was written by AI".
I personally don't care if AI is a writing instrument for a human who's signing off on the content, as long as the writing is good and the source is legitimate.
If connecting with the audience and guiding them to understand your thoughts is irrelevant, then you are missing the point of writing and being an academic.
There is a reason AI slop is revolting to read. It doesn't care.
...
"The author drafted this essay in extended collaboration with Claude Fable 5.1."
-----------------
If you read a lot of journal articles, you're probably accustomed to occasionally running into articles a ways outside your bailiwick that are written poorly, you don't really understand, which you suspect made it past reviewers who didn't really understand it, and indeed, you suspect the author didn't really understand it either. Everyone involved just gave them the benefit of the doubt because they were too busy to figure out what the tortured language really meant. However, you don't know for sure, so you decide to leave it up to people in that particular field to deal with.
I can't speak for others, but I find AI writing to be frequently similar in its effect on me to bad writing. Yes, the grammar is correct, but it beats around the bush and puts emphasis on the wrong things. Even if you filter Claude through a human, those poor choices tend to shine through. This subtly inhuman voice switches your brain off. I suspect a lot of bad science is going to slip past reviewers because of LLM writing, and a lot of good science is going to slip past those who might need to read it, because the LLM co-written article switched their brains off and failed to make itself understood.
I understand the notion that, if the content is good enough, it shouldn't matter if the article is written poorly or co-written with AI. However, if the content is good enough, isn't it worth communicating it well?
Is that so? And that's about it?
LLM writing is horrible, full stop. The vast majority of papers that I see with obvious LLM writing ticks are also frankly incomprehesible. Claude's biggest sin at the moment is inventing new terminology (sometimes multiple times in a single sentence!) without stopping to explain what it means.
In previous years, I would see a substantial fraction (maybe 30-50%) of papers that were obviously written by non-native English speakers, and full of grammatical mistakes and typos. I have seen zero papers like that this year. Honestly, I preferred those: reading LLM writing is painful by comparison.
So far I have seen exactly one paper that had obvious LLM writing ticks, and yet had gone through enough passes (either of the LLM or the human authors) that the paper itself was comprehensible. So I'll admit that it's possible to do. But based on what I've seen this is vastly in the minority.
I honestly used to enjoy the review process; even when the papers were bad at least I could usually see the effort that went into it and give some constructive guidance on how to improve. The process is dramatically less pleasant now, and it's not obvious if I'm accomplishing anything: if authors who write with LLMs just stick the reviews back into those same LLMs, will they learn anything? I suspect not.
Maybe some day LLMs will be good enough to write, but as of today: please, please, just don't do it. The typos and grammatical mistakes are easier to read than the slop.
But writing.. FFS everything I see is just AI slop. And I only realize when I start wondering why the paper is going and going and saying nothing, and then pangram tells me that everything past the intro is just AI. :/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callirhoe_(novel)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Eyre
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_and_Deviltry