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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

It seems bad for OpenAI to make this about latex documents, which will be now associated, visually, with AI slop. The opposite of what anyone wants really. Nobody wants you to know they used a chatbot!

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This is just because LaTeX is widely used by researchers.

Also yes, LaTeX being source code it's much easier to get an AI to genere LaTeX than integrate into MS Word.

Please refrain from incorporating em dashes into your LaTeX document. In summary, the absence of em dashes in LaTeX.

Am I missing something? LaTeX is associated with slop now?

If a common AI tool produces latex documents, the association will be created yeah. Right now latex would be a high indicator of manual effort, right?

don't think so. I think latex was one of academics' earlier use cases of chatgpt, back in 2023. That's when I started noticing tables in every submitted paper looking way more sophisticated than they ever did. (The other early use case of course being grammar/spelling. Overnight everyone got fluent and typos disappeared.)

It's funny, I was reading a bunch of recent papers not long ago (I haven't been in academia in over a decade) and I was really impressed with the quality of the writing in most of them. I guess in some cases LLMs are the reason for that!

If you’ve got an existing paragraph written that you just know could be rephrased more eloquently, and can describe the type of rephrasing/restructuring you want… LLMs absolutely slap at that.

I recently got wrongly accused of using LLMs to help write an article by a reviewer. He complained that our (my and my co-worker's) use of "to foster" read "like it was created by ChatGPT". (If our paper was fluent/eloquent, that's perhaps because having an M.A. in Eng. lit. helped for that.)

I don't think any particular word alone can be used as an indicator for LLM use, although certain formatting cues are good signals (dashes, smileys, response structure).

We were offended, but kept quiet to get the article accepted, and we changed some instances of some words to appease them (which thankfully worked). But the wrong accusation left a bit of a bad aftertaste...

LaTeX is already standard in fields that have math notation, perhaps others as well. I guess the promise is that "formatting is automatic" (asterisk), so its popularity probably extends beyond math-heavy disciplines.

> Right now latex would be a high indicator of manual effort, right?

...no?

Just one Google search for "latex editor" showed more than 2 in the first page.

https://www.overleaf.com/

https://www.texpage.com/

It's not that different from using a markdown editor.

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