Humans are notoriously bad at checking for meticulous detail—hence why copyediting was a specialized role. We’ve seen what’s happened since the newspapers eliminated it for cost savings.

I only used an LLM for the first time recently, to rewrite a YouTube transcript into a recipe. It was excellent at the overall restructuring, but it made a crucial and subtle mistake. The recipe called for dividing 150g of sugar, adding 30g of cornstarch to one half, and blanching eggs in that mixture. ChatGPT rewrote it so that you blanched the eggs in the other half, without the cornstarch. This left me with a boiling custard that wasn’t setting up.

I did confirm that the YouTube transcript explicitly said to use the sugar and cornstarch mixture. But I didn’t do a side by side comparison because the whole reason for doing the rewrite is that transcripts are difficult to read!