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    "just use a tool that's specifically designed for spelling and/or grammar checking... you get to skip the whole discussion about what should/shouldn't be allowed" even grammar tools are finding ways to involve AI: grammarly.com/ai Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 8:09
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    @starball then don't use that either. It's still a different tool from the default plugin. Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 8:11
  • Totally agree with this answer, however @starball has a valid and sad point: sooner or later, everything will have AI, or be assisted with AI in one way or another. It's already happening, and there's no way to stop it. :/ Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 8:35
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    @Tinkeringbell: first, I don't find your explanation insulting in any way, IMHO it is a solid base for a discussion. However, your answer is pretending my question is only about using an LLM for spelling and/or grammar checking. But I clearly wrote "wording" and "phrasing", and my impression is that is exactly where LLMs have their strengths. I am pretty sure you read that part of my question, but intentionally left it out in your answer. Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 10:26
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    @ShadowWizardLoveZelda It's 100% certain that the AI will hallucinate and change your text. You might be able to detect it, or not. But there's only way to fix it: don't do that. That's an exaggeration, and it's not true. ChatGPT if used as a proofreading tool does, in fact, do a more than decent job. Just don't ask it to write an answer for you. Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 11:10
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    @DocBrown I did see that, and I would argue that LLMs do not have strengths there either. They reword and paraphrase, but if you look closer at what they're doing, half the time they're making things worse, not better. And it requires knowledge of the language to recognize this, and if you're a non-native speaker that's already unsure about something, that knowledge probably lacks. If someone can't recognize right from wrong already, what makes you think the LLM that rhymes 'smith' with 'labyrinth' or 'haze' with 'vague' will choose the rights words for someone? Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 11:16
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    I've given my post an edit to make that point a bit more explicit, it was already sort-of in there when I said that LLMs will change text just because they're told to change text, but I've added a paragraph fleshing that point out. Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 11:18
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    "I would argue that this means that for wording/phrasing, if you're not proficient enough in a language to know something is wrong or right from the beginning, you can not at this point trust the LLM to make the right choice for you." - sorry, but this argument is quite questionable. Most people (including me), when they know a foreign language, their passive knowledge is a lot better than their active knowledge. And I am not talking about some assessment if something is "wrong or right". I am talking of letting ChatGPT making linguistic improvements (see example in my question). Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 12:21
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    @DocBrown You're talking about making ChatGPT make new text for you, based on some prompt. That is, in its very essence, AI-generated content. Talking about it as if ChatGPT is 'making linguistic improvements' is simply not true, the AI generates an entirely new text based upon your prompt and whatever training data it has about what that prompt means. Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 12:27
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    (as for the 'if you're not proficient enough', take that to mean the passive knowledge is also lacking. If you don't have the active and passive knowledge to know right from wrong from the beginning, an LLM won't save you). Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 12:52
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    I really strongly object to this perspective that AI has to inevitably make input worse. These tools aren't being built in a vacuum– they're being built to be useful and worthwhile by their makers. Yes, they get a bad rap from people using them for silly things or things for which they're not "designed", but to go as far as saying "don't use Grammarly, a tool built for improving grammar, because it uses AI" is, I don't know how else to put this, absurd. Judge tools by their actual performance, not by some perceived AI boogeyman. You really water down your argument this way. Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 17:50
  • Otherwise, your core argument is very valid– SE already bans folks from machine-translating posts made in other languages because translations "can be inaccurate, and even human translations risk distorting the intended meaning of the post", which very arguably applies strongly to the issue at hand– but your argument is made actively worse by not focusing on this aspect first, and AI second. Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 17:53
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    @zcoop98 I've seriously considered deleting everything after the first paragraph and just linking to wizzwizz's post instead as they do a much better job of outlining why using a LLM sucks for rewriting/spelling/grammar then I apparently can. But voting sorted stuff already. Commented Jan 10, 2024 at 18:12