Comment by Zambyte
5 days ago
It depends on the goal of the text. I don't care if technical documentation is written by human or machine. I care if it's correct and helpful. I don't care if a letter providing emotional support for a lost loved one is a perfectly accurate, beautifully structured piece of text. I care that it's heartfelt, coming from a person that meant what they wrote. Such metadata is important for the latter, but irrelevant for the former.
This is something that gets glossed over a lot in the debate. "Writing to convey functional information" has a different set of success criteria than "Writing to convey emotion and shared human experience". One might still legitimately argue that knowing that a text is LLM-generated undermines confidence in the former (there's no guarantee that a coherent mind exists that can clarify ambiguities); but much _less_ so than for the latter.
People have been buying and sending Get Well and Happy Birthday cards for centuries, written by other people who don't give a shit about sharing their human experience with the receiver, and are just doing their jobs as professional greeting card writers.