That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either.
On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.
They need to learn to write clearly. I believe there's a direct connection between clear thought and clear words.
Now, I also see the counterargument that, in the doctor example, the computer is simply a tool that improves a process rather than a crutch that replaces the underlying knowledge, but I suspect that, in a lot of cases, that's probably OK.
If you can write clearly enough to express your idea to an LLM, then perhaps you should just send that to the person you're writing to.
How are you going to prompt effectively and not allow the LLM to infer a bunch of nonsense?
My thought is that perhaps there is some utility to using AI to help in routine scenarios, such as for example when a language barrier prevents someone from explaining themselves well, or when they are struggling to find the right words to express themselves.
Primarily, I was trying to stay away from an absolutist view of the problem to see if there are circumstances in which AI can be useful even considering all its shortcomings. There seems to be a lot of “all or nothing” perspective on its use right now, and I was simply wondering whether it might be a better idea to take a more pragmatic approach.
We do this with a lot of tech in real life: You don't need to be an MD to decide to take an aspirin, or an F1 driver to take the car to the grocery store (well, maybe in some cities, but that's beside the point). The problem is not with using technology, but with abandoning your judgment to it.
Reading what someone wrote while they were learning = less valuable.
I just want the clear communication.
ALTERNATIVE Thought: I’m willing to post/comment to help them if I think they will listen. An LLM behind the writing destroys this part of the community, because there’s nobody to teach/argue with. It’s just wasting our time and energy.