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Because LLCs aren't people

Am I missing something? LaTeX is associated with slop now?

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?

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.)

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!

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...


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.

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.

> Right now latex would be a high indicator of manual effort, right?

...no?

Just one Google search for "latex editor" showed more than 2 in the first page.

https://www.overleaf.com/

https://www.texpage.com/

It's not that different from using a markdown editor.


How would this work for independent researchers?

(no snark)


I can't think of anybody apart from Osama bin Laden who wouldn't want to play Candy Crush. \s


Something with KDE. Never used KDE extensively because I hate non-tiling WMs, but something like Kubuntu would give you a more windows-esque experience by default. Here's the download link:

https://kubuntu.org/download/

Bon appetit!


I don't use KDE either, but it does seem to be the most Windows adjacent choice. Unless you like very old versions of Windows in which case you may prefer XFCE like me (Xubuntu or the xfce variant of Linux mint).

I heard Kubuntu is not a great distro for KDE, but I can't comment on that personally.


I guess the way one would verify that this is more general trend in academia would be to run this on accepted papers to a non-AI conference?


It was slow to load for me but loaded eventually.


I'm doing some research, and this is something I'm unsure of. I see that "suppressing null results" is a bad thing, and I sort of agree, but for me personally, a lot of the null results are just the result of my own incompetence and don't contain any novel insights.


I believe so


> "it objectively made the search product worse"

I would disagree, because without the advertising there probably would be no Google.


Arguably Google could go the way of AOL and no one would notice


This is probably the funniest comment I've seen this week. Yes, I'm sure all 3 billion users of Google products wouldn't notice.


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