But a lot of people are of the opinion that for many papers it helps to have a secondary publication where the author puts the work in the appropriate context. I’m trying to build a shared mental model with the author, to help me better understand the underlying work; that is harder to do when there’s no mind behind the words.
> that is harder to do when there’s no mind behind the words.
Presumably the author read the text before publish and agreed with the summary. What's the problem exactly?
On the other hand, if one uses AI but keeps content density constant (e.g. grammar fixes for non-native speakers) or even negative (compress this repetitive paragraph), I think it can be a useful net productivity boost.
Current AI can't really add information, but a lot of editing is subtracting, and as long as you check the output for hallucinations (and prompt-engineer a lot since models like to add) imo LLMs can be a subtraction-force-multiplier.
Ironically: anti-slop; or perhaps, fighting slop with slop.
Eg
> This suggests that the EM structure isn’t just an analogy — it’s the natural grain of the optimization landscape
I don't care if someone uses llm. But it shows a lack of care to do it in this blatant way without noting it. Eg at work I'll often link prompt-response in docs as an appendix, but I will call out the provenance
If you find those sentences to be helpful, great! I find it decreases the signal in the article and makes me skim it. If you're wondering why people complain, it's because sharing a post intended to be skimmed without saying, hey you should skim this, is a little disrespectful of someone's time
As someone in the field, this means nothing, and I'm very suspicious of the article as a whole because it has so many sentences like this.
The essay kind of works for me as an impressionistic context for the three papers, but without those three papers I think it's almost more confusing than it helps.