Using LLMs for any kind of writing is unethical, with the narrow exception of translation. If you didn't take the time to compose your words thoughtfully then you aren't owed the time to read them.
I think it's fine to have an llm write a first or second draft of something, then go through and reword most of it to be in your own voice.
With LLMs this is less clear, you don’t get the old school artifacts, instead you get hallucinations, and very subtle errors that completely alter the meaning while leaving the sentence intact enough that your reader might not know this is a machine translation error.
and it will also "clean up" the text to the point where important nuances and tangents get removed/transformed into some perfect literature where it loses its meaning and/or significance
Quite frankly, while having an LLM draft and rewriting it would be okay, I do not believe it is reasonable to expect that to ever happen. It will be either like high school paper plagarism (Just change around some of the sentences and rephrase it bro), or it will simply not even get that much. It is unreasonable with what we know about human psychology to expect that "Human-Rewrites of LLM drafts", at the level that the human contributes something, are maintainable and scalable; Most people psychologically can't put in that effort.
It might give efficiency gains for the writer, but the reader has to read the slop and try to guess at what it was intending to communicate and weed out "hallucinations". That's a big loss of efficiency for the reader.
The purpose of written language is to express your thoughts or ideas to others. If you're synthesizing text and then refining it you're not engaging in that practice.
Maybe the poster is running a local LLM.. you’d think that a SOTA model would have surmised that an overnight MacOS upgrade can only be a minor version.
Plus, when someone wrote the documentation, I can ask the author about details and they'll probably know since they had enough domain expertise and knowledge of the code to explain anything that might be missing. I can't trust you to know anything about the code you had an AI generate and then had an AI write documentation for.
Then there's the accuracy issue. Any documentation can always be inaccurate and it can obviously get outdated with time, but at least with human-authored documentation, I can be confident that the content at some point matched a person's best understanding of the topic. With AI, no understanding is involved; it's just probabilistically generated text, we've all hopefully seen LLMs generate plausible-sounding but completely wrong text enough to somewhat doubt their output.
The choice is not usually “have humans write amazing top notch documentation, or use an LLM”.
The choice is usually “have sparse, incomplete, out-of-date documentation… or use an LLM”.
I have done a lot of technical writing in my career, and documenting things is exactly where you run into the worst design problems before they go live.
For example, you chose to read my response and attack the vocabulary as if that was the point I was trying to make. This is a misunderstanding. I am purposefully reusing the word choice of the comment I'm replying to.
I was trying to very concisely point out that if an LLM is generating your writing it is not your words or your thoughts that you're trying to communicate.
The solution to this form of elitism was not to make everyone speak RP, but to encourage non-RP accents, which is more common in the modern BBC.
Your comment seems elitist by encouraging the use of artifice to fit better into an elitist world, rather than breaking down elitism.
Apply this argument to code, to art, to law, to medicine.
It fails spectacularly.
Blaming the tool for the failure of the person is how you get outrageous arguments that photography cant be art, that use of photoshop makes it not art...
Do you blame the hammer or the nail gun when the house falls down, or is it the fault of the person who built it?
If you dont know what you're doing, it isnt the tools fault.
Presenting synthesized words as original thought isn't using a tool, it's laziness at best.
Lawyers thoughtfully write laws that other lawyers understand. I’m not sure why that’s confusing.