You know, back in the era when proofreaders were human, I never one met a proofreader who rewrote my text afresh, rather than annotating the text with a pen.
It's still possible to use Claude to proofread - highlight grammatical, flow, structure, logic errors and make simple suggestions for you to pick and choose or adapt as you wish. No watermarking will flag your text. No flaw accusations of LLM authorship will haunt you. All will be fine.
But if you want an LLM to rewrite your text, that's (a) not proofreading, and (b) should be flagged as LLM generated ... because it is.
Where is the problem with using LLM generated text?
You could use your own hypothetical house elf to do it for you, or pay someone to do it. LLMs are just cheaper for a certain set of problems.
People will find ways to circumvent this, so this limitation will only hit the technically less adept people.
> Where is the problem with using LLM generated text?
In the fact that you didn't write it.
> You could use your own hypothetical house elf to do it for you, or pay someone to do it.
Yes, and those would be similarly problematic (and more expensive).
> In the fact that you didn't write it.
This is a fact and this is generally not a problem. Customer support guy Joe did not write that email to you with a refund: someone else did it and Joe did pick the template. Alice did not write that post card to Bob, someone else did and she just googled some nice text. We deal with a lot of content that wasn’t written by the person who signed it. That content, when written by LLM, may indeed contain watermarks and nobody will care about the choice of words, because only the meaning matters in such communications.
People pay too much attention to authenticity here, which is no more than a demonstration of an effort. LLM can and should write scientific articles because the real effort is in directing research, not summarizing it. LLMs can and should write news, because it is cheap and efficient, and real reporting is in discovery. LLM can and should write fiction and make movies, because there is no reason why creators of various junk should earn their money easily. LLMs do not replace real talent. They just emphasize for an average person how easily replaceable they are. And that‘s ok. Creative industry is a blue collar job now.
If it's not a problem, then there should be no issue with not concealing the fact, no? Lying about things one considers inconsequential is a useful signal about one's willingness to lie with little benefit.
If there was a ghostwriting detector, I would use that too.
Nobody says it's a problem. We'd just like to know.
Factory farming also makes meat cheaper than organic practices. I'd just like to know which one I'm getting.
Nonsense. Forget proofreaders. Think editors. In publishing some editors practically wrote the books. And then theres ghostwriting ! Think of that!
Part of me wishes we had the same regulation for ghostwriting etc. Nobody should be claiming to have written a book they didn't.
Okay, then it should be acknowledged if a work was AI-edited-written, or AI-ghostwritten.