[swatcoder]

> and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections

???

Why in the world would that be an "ofc"?

If you're trying to establish yourself as a writer and communicator, LLM's are the last thing you want to color your personal voice with. They may have a role in cleaning up interpersonal communication or in helping non-professional communicators shape up their prose for formal occasions, but they are not some kind of magic neutral way to improve a writer's writing.

As you're seeing here, all that work would have been better received without the compromises and tells of LLM-ese because it would have been your writing, in your voice, as an intelligent analyst and communicator. The idiosyncrasies of that prose voice (your prose voice), are a durable signature that people come to associate with you individually and help them interpret tone, inflection, emphasis, insight in ways that the genericism and accent of an LLM scrubs out.

Give yourself more credit and don't do this; or at least don't treat it as an "of course"!

[raffael_de]

I also don't understand this. After having written something I never felt a need to have it reformulated by anything. What would even be the prompt for that?

[ASalazarMX]

Maybe "You are an expert editor. Polish this article for X demographic. Make no mistales."?

But jokes aside, I too prefer genuine human writing. Writing is complex enough that you can see a distinct style even if it's rough. LLMs tend to polish the roughness so much that everything reads like magazine ads.

[Idilunlu]

I think it's easy for native speakers to say. But as English is not my mother tongue, I find it safer to run it through a checker and nowadays, LLMs. So maybe no need to be so harsh about it

[matusp]

I understand that motive. On the other hand, LLM smell makes the text untrustworthy. I have detected it as well, and I immediately started to wonder about whether I am reading a reasonable expert analysis or just an AI hallucination. I still don't know.

I recommend prompting the LLM to mostly fix glaring grammatical and stylistic mistakes, not to rewrite the entire thing into a LinkedIn post style text.

[vizzier]

Or us dyslexics, I don't mind having the robot check and rephrase my work.

[nlawalker]

Have you ever had someone else edit your work, comment on it and provide alternative phrasings or organization? LLMs are pretty good at that, available any time and give instant results, as long as you understand that they work differently from a human reviewer - you can't expect it to be of the quality you'd get from a subject-matter expert or highly skilled writer, you have to lean into the LLM slot-machine model where you just get some alternative options. But it's incredibly useful when you're stuck in a rut with how to conceptualize or explain something, or even when you're not, and just want to visualize some alternatives that come from somewhere outside of your own head.

I think of it like a power thesaurus. Thesauruses get a bad rap for people just using them to look for ten-dollar words, but they're super useful for finding ways to articulate things differently, which can sometimes lead to bigger insights or ideas about restructuring the content.

It's on the author to look at what's suggested by the LLM and decide whether or not to use it, and there's an inherent danger in having one's voice overridden by simply accepting too many of the recommendations as-is. But that's between the author and the tool. I won't make any comment here on the article author's prose or how they maybe did or didn't use LLMs.