> I'm not (...) producing technical literature for others to consume, but I feel like I'd want my humanity to come through on important topics like this.
This will absolutely be just an opinion, but the kind of documentations I dislike the most are the ones that are (full of) arbitrarily structured prose. There's a time and place for self-expression and phrasing liberties; intricate, brittle, and especially long technical descriptions I don't think is one of them.
Definitely, I think I wrote imprecisely when I used "humanity". I meant more like I personally wrote it, the sentence structure and grammar are mine, the mistakes are mine, and hopefully it's still clear and easy to understand.
Speaking of mixing technical text and style/prose, I feel this link from yesterday did a great job executing both (granted it is an article, not a paper):
I think we're on the same page, it's just that I feel otherwise about this part:
> and hopefully it's still clear and easy to understand
The idea of leaving it up to fate whether it's clear and easy to understand what I write, and that the sentence structure and grammar mistakes aren't inhibiting or misleading understanding, terrifies me.
Now of course, it's not a terror a hearty serving of pressure, laziness, and overconfidence doesn't compensate for, so I usually just march on ahead and type what I have to type out nevertheless. But I do yearn for better.
Maybe the real deciding factor though is that I'm ashamed and insecure of my writing style rather than proud or appreciative of it, and that's why I'd rather cast it away, substituting it, than keep it. Hard to tell.
Great insight, definitely touches on another reason someone might reach for an LLM. Like some others pointed out, writing papers (especially not in ones native language) is its own complete task and with challenges and skills required beyond whatever the paper's topic is, and that's a totally valid reason to involve an LLM.
This will absolutely be just an opinion, but the kind of documentations I dislike the most are the ones that are (full of) arbitrarily structured prose. There's a time and place for self-expression and phrasing liberties; intricate, brittle, and especially long technical descriptions I don't think is one of them.