Comment by nemomarx

Comment by nemomarx 5 days ago

6 replies

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?

jasonfarnon 5 days ago

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.)

  • jmdaly 5 days ago

    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!

    • jll29 4 days ago

      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...

    • trentnelson 5 days ago

      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.

MITSardine 5 days ago

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.