In general, I think those use cases are fine.

But... AI generated content is a slippery slope. Someone earlier today asked me to "review" a 50 page document they had completely generated with AI yet obviously not reviewed themselves. It is embarrassing.

Not parent commenter, but my answer is "no to all".

I am genuinely curious if you are trolling, or putting that forward as a genuine argument?

Trivially, it's the difference between medium, and message/content.

On one axis, whether message is spoken, written via pen or typewriter or word processor, sent electronically, faxed,mailed, etc - it is fundamentally a communication from one human being to another, even if medium / mechanics differ.

The other axis is actual content - genuine human interaction, intent, message and connection, vs a result of a prompt.

> Same thing as using a word processor and printer rather than handwriting a note. Inexcusable.

There is no confusion, when in receipt of something written using a word processor, that it was so written, and people are free to respond accordingly (though, of course, most of us don't care). There is no such certainty with products generated by AI, so it is appropriate responsibly to disclose it.

A trivial search can find examples of Linux updates breaking all sorts of things, like wifi and other drivers/firmware.

A month ago my debian 13 laptop out of the complete blue decided it wanted zero DNS. Might have been an update that did it I am not sure.

I was unable to resolve it and ended up reinstalling.

If one is trying to avoid plagiarism, starting with an AI draft and polishing it to avoid signs of its true origins is not a good method.

at this point I really think its better to read broken english than have to read some clanker slop. it immediately makes me want to just ignore whatever text i'm reading, its just a waste of time

The LLM presents a perverse incentive here - It is used for perceived efficiency gains, most of which would be consumed by the act of rewriting and redrafting. The alienness of the thoughts in the document is also non-condusive to this; Reading a long document about something you think you know but did not write is exhausting and mentally painful - This is why code review has such relatively poor results.

Quite frankly, while having an LLM draft and rewriting it would be okay, I do not believe it is reasonable to expect that to ever happen. It will be either like high school paper plagarism (Just change around some of the sentences and rephrase it bro), or it will simply not even get that much. It is unreasonable with what we know about human psychology to expect that "Human-Rewrites of LLM drafts", at the level that the human contributes something, are maintainable and scalable; Most people psychologically can't put in that effort.

I don't think that's fine, I think that's an example of why using LLMs to write is unethical and creates no value.

The purpose of written language is to express your thoughts or ideas to others. If you're synthesizing text and then refining it you're not engaging in that practice.

Agreed, which is why I didn't bother reading this comment before downvoting it. If you think that you were owed some other behavior from me despite not paying me for it, feel free to elaborate; for example, you could acknowledge that there exists an implicit social contract when it comes to basic human communication.

I of course expect my lawyer and doctor to thoughtfully apply their knowledge to help me. Why should they be any different?

“compose thoughtfully” != layman terminology

Lawyers thoughtfully write laws that other lawyers understand. I’m not sure why that’s confusing.

I do apply it to those, and I don't see how it "fails" at anything.

Presenting synthesized words as original thought isn't using a tool, it's laziness at best.

As someone who has dealt with projects with AI-generated documentation... I can't really say I agree. Good documentation is terse, efficiently communicating the essential details. AI output is soooooooo damn verbose. What should've been a paragraph becomes a giant markdown file. I like reading human-written documentation, but AI-slop documentation is so tedious I just bounce right off.

Plus, when someone wrote the documentation, I can ask the author about details and they'll probably know since they had enough domain expertise and knowledge of the code to explain anything that might be missing. I can't trust you to know anything about the code you had an AI generate and then had an AI write documentation for.

Then there's the accuracy issue. Any documentation can always be inaccurate and it can obviously get outdated with time, but at least with human-authored documentation, I can be confident that the content at some point matched a person's best understanding of the topic. With AI, no understanding is involved; it's just probabilistically generated text, we've all hopefully seen LLMs generate plausible-sounding but completely wrong text enough to somewhat doubt their output.

This immediately invalidates a software or technical project for me. The value of documentation isn't the output alone, but the act of documenting it by a person or people that understand it.

I have done a lot of technical writing in my career, and documenting things is exactly where you run into the worst design problems before they go live.

An elitist attitude towards plagiarists is common.

I disagree, because those aren't their words.