But man, I don't write academic papers anymore, but I have to write a lot of reports and such for my work and I've tried to use different LLM's to help and almost always the biggest help is just in making me go "Man, this sucks, it should be more like this." and then I proceed to just write the whole thing with the slight advantage of knowing what a badly written version looks like.
That's basically Classifier-free guidance for LLMs! It basically takes an additional prompt and says "not this. Don't do this. In fact, never come near this shit in general. Ew." And pushes the output closer to the original prompt by using the "not this" as a reference to avoid.
My favorite was when it kept summarizing too much. I then told it to include all of my points, which it mostly just ignored. I finally figured out it was keeping under its own cap of 5000 words in a response.
I've had the reverse issue, where I wanted to input a large amount of text for ChatGPT to work with. Tried to do a workaround where part of my prompt was that I was going to give it more information in parts. No matter how I phrased things it would always try to start working with whatever I gave it with the first prompt so I just gave up and did it myself.
If you use it to just get started, but actually read it and have the expertise to fix mistakes and make it relevant, it's probably fine. Not necessarily because it's faster, but because some people just suck at getting started, and having nonsense to correct is easier to start correcting than turning whitespace into something.
Yeah, fair enough. Someone here in the thread already said they use LLMs to just outline what to write and how, and then start something along these lines from scratch
I recall hearing of at least two bills passed that had this... and were not even filled in yet, yeesh:-(.
Someone should really try to poison the well here, and put in a line that says: Insert social security number and a valid credit card number here... Except like the above people probably wouldn't even read that much, yeesh:-(.
Security through obfuscation stupidity! :-) - it can be adaptive under just the right circumstances!:-)
This goes beyond riders. "Bought" politicians are SO bought that when lobbyists ask politicians to do stuff, they do it unquestioningly. And I mean: THE WHOLE BILL - not just one sentence within it.
But, you may ask, aren't they also incredibly lazy too? And the answer is yes! So the lobbyists have to do all the work to write out the bills... and then the congressperson simply signs it, easy peasy. "I, insert name here, from state, insert state name here, do solemnly swear that..." - AND I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING, the bill was passed while STILL saying both "insert name here" and also "insert state name here"!!!!!!
So while I am shocked and sickened afresh to hear of plagiarism within academic circles, which I had hoped would be one of the last hold-outs, literal beacons and bastions of Freedom and Truth and all that rizz, politics was the opposite of that and has allowed plagiarism for a LONG time.
My master's was fueled by Starbucks, and my Ph.D. is fueled by spite. Don't get me wrong; I am not against using LLMs for help, especially for ESLs. It's a fantastic tool for developing your thoughts when used ethically. I've put placeholders with GPT for framing in my drafts which eventually become something completely different by the end product. This is an issue with peer review and publishing monopolies, aka late-stage capitalism. This draft was clearly not peer-reviewed and is a likely consequence of publish or perish.