When I seek input (whether passively or actively; it doesn't matter) from another person, then I generally want that person's input. I want their words.

They can be broken and jumbled, or terse AF, or combine to be Pulitzer-quality prose. Either way: I want to consume their own unique human expression of a concept.

There's value in raw human expression, including in the missteps.

If I instead want the regurgitated waggyings of a bot, then: I know how to get that on my own.

We've all got web browsers and pocket supercomputers. We've all (well, most of us) been alive and aware of LLMs since their recent rise from infancy.

It's a no-brainer for us to paste some paragraphs into our favorite chatbot and get a summary or an artificial expansion or whatever else we wish to have. If that's what our goal is, then we can do that on a whim -- and we can still retain the original expression.

But doing it on our behalf is deleterious, unsettling, and unhelpful. It has negative value to the beholder.

But the reader cannot be sure they ARE understanding what you are trying to convey. Maybe the LLM added something you never thought of, maybe it made form to your various thoughts in a way that isn't actually true to the way you would have communicated them if you did it yourself.

The exercise of writing is an important step of actually understanding your own thoughts properly. Readers are reading to get a sense of your own experience and ideas on the topic, if it turns out you didn't actually write the final thing yourself they'll always feel a sense – in whatever way – of being conned by the author. Intentional or not.

Technical documentation, where what the reader wants to come away with is the clear facts on what something does and how to use it/whatever, is a different matter. But even then editing is key – overlong text, unnecessary information, these will again fight against what the reader is there to get.

With that said, if you do want to do it, a disclaimer is at least upfront and may well show there's no intentional attempt to deceive.

There is a higher tolerance for LLM-isms if you asked an LLM to write something for you

Elsewhere it’s painful and irksome when you didn’t ask for it

That's logical, yes. If person A wants to read a summary (even a generated one) outlining the state of modern space dinosaur research, or whatever, and person B also wants the exact same thing, then person B should be happy to read the summary that person A prompted.

The same is true if the thing they both want is a stale cupcake bought from a gas station. But this still doesn't mean that person B wants to be presented with person A's stale thing, because the overhead of the social transaction isn't worth the object. Which is to say, it makes a terrible gift.

I just explained why this is a bad idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767867

TLDR: Communication from a human is not only the material being communicated, it's also a signal that the human understands the message they are sending you. When you pass that message via an intermediary (regardless of whether the intermediary is a human or an LLM), the receiver is never sure that what they received is what you intended.

It's doubly worse when you review it, notice a few additions and think "Great - that makes me sound smart and knowledgeable about this topic", because the receiver now has an inaccurate view about your skill.

At any rate, using an LLM to construct a message for someone else to read is basically sending the wrong signals about your skill levels.

(This probabyl explains why so many people are so ready to use an LLM to write the material - in their minds, it makes them sound smarter than they actually are, but as we've seen from people on this forum vigorously defending the practice with "pangram is wrong" and similar nonsense, they themselves are not skilled enough to recognise slop)

The words of a machine are not of interest to me. I want to hear what you, the human, have to say, imperfections and all. Reading something written by an LLM is actively annoying, and it's not very respectful to inflict that upon others.

There's a difference between me getting AI to write something I want to read, and getting it to write something you want to read. The difference is that I know me, but I don't know you.

The other difference is that, if I get AI to write something for me, I expect something AI-written. If I am writing something for you, you expect something that I wrote, not something that AI wrote.