"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."

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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, and indeed, you suspect the authors didn't really understand. 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.