I am not a native English speaker. This is not surprising to me. I think most of the papers we write would be flagged by AI detectors.

It is not because we ask LLM to write us a paper about X. It is because we are bad at writing in a scientific style, and american editors expect us to do it. With LLMs, we can write in basic sentences and tell the LLM the idea and it converts that to nice writing.

If you write each paragraph and have an LLM make that paragraph more scientific, it is entirely your paper, but it is flagged as LLM generated. If you have an LLM write the paper but speak good enough English, you can make it look human even though it is not human.

It seems that LLMs often insert new ideas even when asked only to polish writing without changing it: https://bsky.app/profile/tomerullman.bsky.social/post/3mq33c...

I don't think this is surprising. Good technical writing is very precise. If you're starting from non-technical writing, I suspect that in most cases you can't make it "sound scientific" without adding new claims or changing the meaning. (Maybe you are being more careful, but this is something that worries me in general.)

most papers like this are flagged by AI detectors because, by your own admission, AI was used to generate the final output. what exactly did you expect here?

Yes that is exactly what I suspected. And I see absolutely nothing wrong with this.

> If you write each paragraph and have an LLM make that paragraph more scientific, it is entirely your paper

"More scientific" is not some merely stylistic thing that faithfully preserves the original meaning of what you wrote. The precise details of each paragraph matters a lot in terms of what and how it communicates. The fact that these details do matter means that, according to my accounting, it is not entirely your paper.

Also, I find striving for "scientific" to be a pretty undesirable thing. Why should papers read like that? What is the benefit? The best papers (in terms of their writing and communication) are unpretentious and conversational. I'm pretty sure I'd prefer your "basic sentences", especially if they were wholly yours. (I understand that there are also external forces at play here as you mentioned.)

My English is fine, and I did hand-write my MSc thesis in English, but scientific style writing is very tedious. Personally I don't think I'd even consider writing a paper "by hand" if I were to write another one.

There really is no point, as long as you verify the content matches your intent and edit out anything poorly written.

Frankly, I've read plenty of papers by native English-speakers over the years that'd strongly benefit from being rewritten by an LLM too...

> It is because we are bad at writing in a scientific style, and american editors expect us to do it. With LLMs, we can write in basic sentences and tell the LLM the idea and it converts that to nice writing.

This is a sin.

There is a fine line between using an LLM to clean up grammar and spelling and using it for text generation.