I'm sure there are deadlines and other constraints that cause professionals to reach for LLMs when producing their work, just like school-age kids use them for homework so they have more time to do whatever they'd rather be doing, so I can understand.
I don't think these papers are about human expression; they're about communicating data and learned information in a way that can be used by others.
You might be thinking of the field of art, which also has strong opinions about AI in their field.
Wording matters when conveying information, ESL speakers should be working with fellow humans when publishing in a language they do not feel comfortable writing on their own.
Seems important to know. LLMs lie and mislead and change meaning and completely ignore my prompt regularly. If I'm just trying to get my work out the door and in the editing phase, I don't trust myself to catch errors introduced by and LLM in my own work.
There is a lack of awareness of the importance of the conveyed meaning in text, not just grammatical correctness. Involving people, not word machines, is the right thing to do when improving content for publication.
It should not be a word machine (which, I should point out, does not have a brain)
Solving this problem might just involve using some of the resources to support the output being correct in the required language. You can call that a "cost"
This will absolutely be just an opinion, but the kind of documentations I dislike the most are the ones that are (full of) arbitrarily structured prose. There's a time and place for self-expression and phrasing liberties; intricate, brittle, and especially long technical descriptions I don't think is one of them.
Speaking of mixing technical text and style/prose, I feel this link from yesterday did a great job executing both (granted it is an article, not a paper):
https://jrsinclair.com/articles/2025/whats-the-difference-be...
> and hopefully it's still clear and easy to understand
The idea of leaving it up to fate whether it's clear and easy to understand what I write, and that the sentence structure and grammar mistakes aren't inhibiting or misleading understanding, terrifies me.
Now of course, it's not a terror a hearty serving of pressure, laziness, and overconfidence doesn't compensate for, so I usually just march on ahead and type what I have to type out nevertheless. But I do yearn for better.
Maybe the real deciding factor though is that I'm ashamed and insecure of my writing style rather than proud or appreciative of it, and that's why I'd rather cast it away, substituting it, than keep it. Hard to tell.
> https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202333/publication-output-by-r...
In the past, just after they submit a poorly-written paper, the sleazeballs at Wiley/Elsevier/Springer would "encourage" said authors to employ their "Author Services" who would edit and rewrite their paper for them, and resubmit it for publication. This didn't come cheap.
Today, everybody just uses LLMs. LLMs are masterful translators of language and concepts. It's a win-win for everybody but Author Services.
Admittedly, word choice and sentence structure are much more limited. (This is not necessarily a bad thing. LLM-written scientific papers can be clearer, and are often more tidy, than human-written scientific papers.) I don't like seeing LLM-written text in journalism, literature, and other media, but I don't mind it so much in scientific literature -- if there's no fraud involved, that is.
Having work that can be edited by a human who understands the concepts –or at least the words— shows a great depth of usefulness to the work itself.
Running your rough draft in one language through an LLM so it appears, at surface glance, to be similar to a publication that a team of humans had been involved in doesn't actually provide value to the author or the reader. Now the author has a paper they cannot say they wrote (or indeed, say who wrote it) and the reader cannot assume that what they read was intended to mean what it now means in English.
If anything, people who write papers in another language to be published in English should be leaning more than ever on human editors and quality assurance measures, not slop machines that hallucinate with good grammar.
I don't have academic paper publishing peers with bad language skills, but I do have colleagues with bad language skills, and the misunderstandings and petty catfights they get themselves into over poorly worded sentences, missing linguistic cues, and misinterpretations, is utterly bonkers.
All otherwise perfectly smart capable people, they just happen to have this as a gap in their skillset. And no, they don't notice if transformative details get added in or left out.
Is this a widespread systemic issue within the organization, or do you work somewhere large enough that it is easy to find examples like this due to the number of people involved?
If it is the former, I would not want to work somewhere that people get into petty catfights over editing and have no abiity to write a sentence or understand linguistic cues. I don't remember working anywhere I would describe in the way you do in your second paragraph.
> And no, they don't notice if transformative details get added in or left out.
I guess I don't have to tell you not to select them as the people to review your work output?
Again, all the examples I'm reading make me think it would be beneficial for folks to include competent team members or external support for projects that will be published in a language you don't speak natively.
Can't tell you for sure (would require me to have comprehensive knowledge of the language skills around the company). I do know a few folks with proper language skills, but they're a rarity (and I treasure them greatly). Could definitely be just my neck of the woods in the company being like this.
> If it is the former, I would not want to work somewhere [like that where] (...)
Yeah, it's not great. The way I solved this was by simply not caring and just talking to them in proper English, hammering them until they provide me (and each other) with enough cross-verifiable information that thus definitely cannot be wrong (or will be wrong in a very defendable way), with an additional serving of double-triple checking everything. Some are annoyed by this, others appreciate it. Such is life I suppose.
> I guess I don't have to tell you not to select them as the people to review your work output?
I don't really have a choice. I think you might misunderstand what it is that I deliver though. I work with cloud technologies, so while I do sometimes deliver technical writing, most of my output is configuration changes and code. When I speak of language barrier issues, that's about chat, email, and ticket communications. I think that's plenty bad enough to have these kinds of troubles in though, especially when it's managers who are having difficulties.
When does your employment contract end?
This hesitance to switch is definitely put to the test a lot these days though :)
I work in a multilingual healthcare field and my output is often translated into different languages. Forms. Posters. Take-home advice following surgery. We provide all of this in every language where more than about 5% of customers speak that, so English, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog and Mandarin.
In addition to English, I speak and read one of these other languages fluently and have since I was about 9 years old, but I don't live in the culture and don't understand the conveyed meaning of translated health-related phrases.
Do you think I use an LLM or an editor that does? No–because that would be silly and could convey information incorrectly to the audience who can only speak that language.
If you want to be quite insulted, turn on the news and get a realistic perspective on what is going on in the world. The people hurt by text going through LLMs is going to be those in extreme poverty and minorities subjected to machine generated translations without human review. You're fighting on a site where most of us would likely be on the same side of so many issues. Let's discuss and not make this facebook full of thoughtless responses.
I have spoken a second language fluently since about 9. I produce work that is translated into that language regularly... by a translator.
Being able to read words does not means I understand the meaning they convey to a person who only speaks that language. These are scientific papers we're talking about, conveyed meaning is valuable and completely lost when a non-native speaker publishes machine generated output that the writer could not have written themselves.
Papers are read by all type of people, I don't know why you assume scientific papers which are almost all written in English are read solely by native English speakers.
People have been doing science in broken English, French, German, Arabic, Latin and more for as long there has been science to be made.
You mention being reminded not to assume someone else's reality by our conversation--I would encourage you to also be reminded of the common fallacy where people wildly overestimate their own abilities, especially when it comes to claiming to speak/read/write multiple languages with knowledge akin to a native speaker.
It is unfortunately very common to mislead oneself about abilities when you haven't had to rely on that skillset in a real environment.
I would venture that you don't regularly work with multiple languages in your work outputs, or you would have likely received feedback by now that could help provide understanding about the nuances of language and communication.
Keeping to anecdotals and opinions though, I only speak one foreign language sadly, that being English, but this effect is very familiar to me, and is also frequently demonstrated and echoed by my peers too. Even comes up with language loss, not just language learning. Goes hand-in-hand with reading, writing, listening, and speaking being very different areas of language ability too, the latter two being areas I'm personally weak in. That's already a disparity that a cursory read of your position says shouldn't exist (do correct me if I'm misinterpreting what your stance is though).
And all this is completely ignoring how even the native language output one produces can be just straight up wrong sometimes, and not faithful to intentions. I've been talking about it like there's a finish line too, but there really isn't. This is why things like mechanized math proofs are so useful. They are composed in formal languages rather than natural ones, enabling their evaluation to be automated (they are machine-checkable). No unintended semantics lost or added.
I disagree with the assertion that a person should rely on an LLM as part of their ability to publish in a language they don't understand well enough themselves to complete without involving a word machine.
> Digging into each others' backgrounds is not this.
I spoke from experience and it was then skewered by someone cosplaying the duolingo owl on the internet. You can take it up with them if you have an issue.
> And all this is completely ignoring how even the native language output one produces can be just straight up wrong sometimes, and not faithful to intentions.
How does the inability you point out of even a native speaker to clearly and effectively communicate sometimes not simply make it more obvious that a person less familiar with the language should involve a person who is?
I think that's a perfectly obvious point that the person you were replying to, you, and me, are all on board with and have been throughout. Inviting their or your attention to this was not the purpose of that sentence.
> I spoke from experience
Great.
> and it was then skewered by someone cosplaying the duolingo owl on the internet. You can take it up with them if you have an issue.
But my issue was/is with you. I wanted you to stop engaging in the use of combative and emotionally charged language. I understand that you feel justified in doing so, but nevertheless, I'm asking you to please stop. It dilutes your points, and makes it significantly harder to engage them. I further don't think you guys were disagreeing nearly hard enough to justify it, but that's really not my place to say in the end.
> I disagree with the assertion that a person should rely on an LLM as part of their ability to publish in a language they don't understand well enough themselves to complete without involving a word machine.
Thanks for clarifying - it genuinely looked like you were disagreeing with what I mentioned too.
You seem very intelligent, I truly believe your time and energy would be better spent doing literally anything else than providing me feedback on my commenting etiquette. Please, I implore you to do more with your time that will provide value! You genuinely seem smart.
(See how that felt? That's the effectiveness of telling someone on the internet you want them to behave differently. It's really pointless.)
I mean, I think this was pretty alright? I appreciate the advice too, and even generally agree with it. This was just my extremely poor attempt at deescalation, because I thought it might work out nevertheless.
Based on what I've seen, LLMs can write scientific English just fine. Some struggle with the style, preferring big pretentious words and long vague sentences. Like in some caricature of academic writing. And sometimes they struggle with the nuances of the substance, but so do editors and translators who are not experts in the field.
Scientific communication is often difficult. Sometimes everyone uses slightly different terminology. Sometimes the necessary words just don't exist in any language. Sometimes a non-native speaker struggles with the language (but they are usually aware of it). And sometimes a native speaker fails to communicate (and keeps doing that for a while), because they are not used to international audiences. I don't know how much LLMs can help, but I don't see much harm in using them either.
Also, you severely underestimate the ability of the authors to edit and verify the correctness of their own work. They wrote it in the first place, after all. They know, better than anybody else, what's important to convey.
What's more, this editing step happens before peer review, so if the paper is junk or has glaring errors it'll probably be turned down by most respectable publications. Even the marginal publications won't publish stuff that's really bad.
If you don't like Author Services, use someone else. Involve a coauthor. This is not even a remotely hard problem to solve.
That's not the interesting part though. The interesting part is that the biggest editing service provider here explicitly states it's okay for the clients to send the papers through AI first then buy their service for 'additional human editing.' They even offer cheaper price for papers that are already edited by AI.
The irony is not lost on me.
I do think it's possible they do, I myself am a foreign speaker who would consider doing something like this, and I think I could notice if that happens. But then I think I'm also well beyond the level where this would be a necessity for me, rather than just a convenience and an additional polishing step.
Yeah, me too, but the claim was if "paper authors have the necessary language skills to ascertain" the correctness of the translation. Regardless of how good the LLM or Author Services are, the problem remains the same.
People don't simply want to shift the effort of a task away from themselves, they also want to shift away the responsibility for doing it wrong.
Wouldn't the paper authors be "blamed" (held responsible) for it, rather than the "Author Services"? Ultimately, they're responsible for the quality of their paper.
Just like I'm responsible for making sure my taxes are paid correctly, even if I use an account, tax lawyer and financial advisor for the whole shebang. If anything is incorrect, I'll be held responsible.
What I mean is that if it's your responsibility to do something right, it acts a deterrent that motivates you to make sure of it.
LLM's allow people to defer this responsibility to the LLM, so they may avoid making sure of things because they let the LLM take upon their responsibility.
If I really think about it, I guess I can see it being relevant like how typesetting software is, for making a paper feel more serious than it really is. Not really the angle I was going for though.
No, they are not. They will - speaking generally - try to produce what seems like a typical translation; which is often the same thing, but not always.
I like the clarity and easy-to-read usability, but at the same time I find the stylistic tics and overusage of words and phrases often grates.
I wonder if this stylistic failure is something that will get fixed or if it's the inevitable consequence of LLMs.
It's the same thing with celebrity impressions. Everyone’s watched Jack Nicholson enough to sense his quirks without naming them. Then a comedian highlights those quirks, and we’re like, “Haha, that’s EXACTLY it!”
I don't publish this kind of output or build on it, but it makes my own topic I need to review more interesting and makes me question it as if I was reading it on a site like those I mention.
Using this kind of output as your own work seems weird, given it is templating so hard on your references -- but I don't like reading the pollyanna GPT speak.
Not sure I'm happy about LLMS getting better... but it feels like an obvious improvement in both computational efficiency and training method.
It actually made me enjoy him a little bit more because normally he is huge arrogant jerk so it gave me pleasure to see him have a human foibles of relying on chatgpt for his output.
AI writing often creates a firehose output of sing-songy, long, over styled text -- which is a lot to ask a reader to get through and really comprehend.
I'm guilty of forming my own conclusion or just believing what I see when I'm in a hurry or unfamiliar or don't care a ton. I'd rather read a human's rough output than a polished generated text version.
So it looks like the authors used some tool to generate plausible citation links, which they did not read before publishing.
They did some real work. Here's their list of "excess style words", ones whose frequency has increased substantially since LLMs:
accentuates, acknowledges, acknowledging, addresses, adept, adhered, adhering, advancement, advancements, advancing, advocates, advocating, affirming, afflicted, aiding, akin, align, aligning, aligns, alongside, amidst, assessments, attains, attributed, augmenting, avenue, avenues, bolster, bolstered, bolstering, broader, burgeoning, capabilities, capitalizing, categorized, categorizes, categorizing, combating, commendable, compelling, complicates, complicating, comprehending, comprising, consequently, consolidates, contributing, conversely, correlating, crafted, crafting, culminating, customizing, delineates, delve, delved, delves, delving, demonstrating, dependability, dependable, detailing, detrimentally, diminishes, diminishing, discern, discerned, discernible, discerning, displaying, disrupts, distinctions, distinctive, elevate, elevates, elevating, elucidate, elucidates, elucidating, embracing, emerges, emphasises, emphasising, emphasize, emphasizes, emphasizing, employing, employs, empowers, emulating, emulation, enabling, encapsulates, encompass, encompassed, encompasses, encompassing, endeavors, endeavours, enduring, enhancements, enhances, ensuring, equipping, escalating, evaluates, evolving, exacerbating, examines, exceeding, excels, exceptional, exceptionally, exerting, exhibiting, exhibits, expedite, expediting, exploration, explores, facilitated, facilitates, facilitating, featuring, formidable, fostering, fosters, foundational, furnish, garnered, garnering, gauged, grappling, groundbreaking, groundwork, harness, harnesses, harnessing, heighten, heightened, hinder, hinges, hinting, hold, holds, illuminates, illuminating, imbalances, impacting, impede, impeding, imperative, impressive, inadequately, incorporates, incorporating, influencing, inherent, initially, innovative, inquiries, integrates, integrating, integration, interconnectedness, interplay, intricacies, intricate, intricately, introduces, invaluable, investigates, involves, juxtaposed, leverages, leveraging, maintaining, merges, methodologies, meticulous, meticulously, multifaceted, necessitate, necessitates, necessitating, necessity, notable, noteworthy, nuanced, nuances, offering, optimizing, orchestrating, outlines, overlook, overlooking, paving, persist, pinpoint, pinpointed, pinpointing, pioneering, pioneers, pivotal, poised, pose, posed, poses, posing, predominantly, preserving, pressing, promise, pronounced, propelling, realm, realms, recognizing, refine, refines, refining, remarkable, renowned, revealing, reveals, revolutionize, revolutionizing, revolves, scrutinize, scrutinized, scrutinizing, seamless, seamlessly, seeks, serves, serving, shaping, shedding, showcased, showcases, showcasing, signifying, solidify, spanned, spanning, spurred, stands, stemming, strategically, streamline, streamlined, streamlines, streamlining, struggle, substantiated, substantiates, surged, surmount, surpass, surpassed, surpasses, surpassing, swift, swiftly, thorough, transformative, typically, ultimately, uncharted, uncovering, underexplored, underscore, underscored, underscores, underscoring, unexplored, unlocking, unparalleled, unraveling, unveil, unveiled, unveiling, unveils, uphold, upholding, urging, utilizes, varying, versatility, warranting, yielding.
That's the vocabulary of business hype. Those are words that appear frequently in company press releases, and are copied into business publications by cut-and-paste journalists. LLMs asked to polish scientific material will use that vocabulary, even in scientific writing. If you trained an LLM on scientific publications, you'd get more scientific jargon, probably misused.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=AI+tools+can...
I wouldn't want to go back to a world without LLMs, but I wish people were more thoughtful in how we use them. Right now, we're seeing AI being slapped on everything like every other trend in the past. When things settle after this upheaval, whether in 20 years or 100, I'd bet AI will still be here and be more useful than ever.
Some of this is simple progress and fine, some of it is terrifying to comprehend.
People in general don't shoe horses anymore, but we also do not need to know how to. Same with crank engine cars. Same with manual transmissions in the USA. That's just the changes in personal transport in a few generations.
And I don't think that's a coincidence either. “Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself”, do not trust an LLM you did not train yourself.
Orwell said these words are vague and are used to obfuscate. Typically to defend the indefensible.
i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
(Much of this came from Orwell's work during WWII, when he worked at the British Ministry of Information. Part of his job was translating news into 1000-word vocabulary Basic English for broadcast in the Colonies, mostly India. Hammering political speech down into Basic English requires forcing it into concrete terms, which is an act of political interpretation. That's where Newspeak, in 1984, came from. 1984 is semi-autobiographical, based on his WWII job. See "Orwell, The Lost Writings". One of his managers was called "Big Brother" behind his back.)
They discovered something real. LLMs turn scientific papers into business-speak, and that there's a lot of that going on. Then they tried to dress up that result for publication, ineptly. Doing so probably improved their chances of getting published.
The word list I posted above is from their additional data PDF file. The paper itself doesn't contain it. Once you see their word list, it's obvious to anyone who follows business news what's going on. Scientific papers are being run through a process that converts them to press releases.
That's a good result, made worse by running it through the process the paper derides.
Writing is a process of communicating one's data and thoughts, and it is the coherent crystallization of such thoughts that produces good scientific papers.
I can't imagine a scenario where an LLM would somehow be able to articulate the outcome of original research better than the researcher themselves. And if the researcher can't articulate their findings, it's dubious that they are worth communicating.
The exception would only be those who are not native English writers, in which case the LLM might improve grammar, etc.
So, only just the vast majority of people in this world? I'm not sure I would call that "the exception".
Scientists who hope that using an LLM to help write a paper will improve the quality of their output are deluding themselves.
Are you really suggesting that all native speakers write perfectly and their writing never needs any corrections whatsoever? I consider that far from the truth for any native speaker of any language and I would of never assumed that.
They are tools and we all have to get used to them.
Soon grok and Deepseek will probably be biased when their owners crack the code, so citing what tools you use will be important.
em3rgent0rdr•5h ago
tiahura•4h ago
dmead•4h ago
leakycap•4h ago
If I needed to program a light sensor to signal when it detects "significant" change in lighting, what does that mean? If I don't define it, it means nothing.
--
"Delve" is a style word, another category highlighted in the article as a signature of generated text.
Leherenn•3h ago
leakycap•3h ago
We aren't talking about "statistically significant" -- that carries meaning only if the statistic is explained, though.
redwall_hp•3h ago
leakycap•3h ago
tiahura•2h ago
leakycap•2h ago
The person I was replying to linked to a Wiki article on "statistical significance" which is not the word being used or discussed in this convo; did you note that before you replied?
You expect an AI to follow context, but the context switched here and none of the humans are seemingly pointing it out. I'd expect LESS of an LLM, not more.
leakycap•4h ago
Given the way generated text works, it makes sense it would less often highlight a directly important phrase or passage or detail, since it has no understanding of what it is writing.
userbinator•4h ago
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ToValueFunfetti•4h ago
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