Comment by pickleRick243

LLMs are tools. In the hands of adept, conscientious researchers, they can only be a boon, assisting in the crafting of the research manuscript. In the hands of less adept, less conscientious users, they accelerate the production of slop. The poster I'm responding to seems to be noting an asymmetry- those who find the most use from these tools could be inept researchers who have no business submitting their work. This is because experienced researchers find writing up their results relatively easy.

To me, this is directly relevant to the issue of democratization of science. There seems to be a tool that is inconveniently resulting in the "wrong" people accelerating their output. That is essentially the complaint here rather than any criticism inherent to LLMs (e.g. water/resource usage, environmental impact, psychological/societal harm, etc.). The post I'm responding to could have been written if LLMs were replaced by any technology that resulted in less experienced or capable researchers disproportionately being able to submit to journals.

To be concrete, let's just take one of prism's capabilities- the ability to "turn whiteboard equations or diagrams directly into LaTeX". What a monstrous thing to give to the masses! Before, those uneducated cranks would send word docs to journals with poorly typeset equations, making it a trivial matter to filter them into the trash bin. Now, they can polish everything up and pass off their chicken scratch as respectable work. Ideally, we'd put up enough obstacles so that only those who should publish will publish.