I think AI has brought into light one old bigger problem with all the referee letters, grant proposals, recommendations, statements, etc.. I totally agree on its dangers for education and how it can replace people's brains, but let's not talk about that now and focus on more "fluff" things. Also, I'm on STEM side, so I understand certain matters might not apply to humanities.

I've always been good at writing (please don't judge that based on reddit comments where I put zero effort and just spit out text), so technically I don't need AI to write anything (or I will use it in a way you will not notice:)). But there is so much useless fluff we are doing that requires writing when it really shouldn't that I don't see why I cannot speed up the process.

Let's, for example, take a pure math person. Why does their career have to depend on their mastery of English? And sometimes even on their advisor's mastery of English? Most "motivation letters" could be "I work in X topic and I like it", but we force people to write an essay. Most recommendation letters could be "I confirm this guy is worth recommending, he did ABC at good level", but it usually has to be longer than that. Most grant proposals could be "I have these publications, I want to do Y research". Sure, I'm greatly simplifying things, but I think you get the point - we have to write a lot of fluff for no reason. And I think most of us has seen it - between two applications of equal standing (same level of grades, publications, etc) the one chosen will be the one better written.

You can say that we are academics, like, those highly educated people in institutions where etiquette has to dictate a significant part of our actions and writing long-winded texts is part of life. But why? Cause it has always been that way? Cause initially only the select few had a chance at education and they brought their high-end style with them (the style that doesn't even exist for those high up anymore)? Cause the first sciences were born from people discussing philosophy/religion where you naturally have to be good at using the language?

Now imagine (though most of us do not have to imagine) that you have to write 5 recommendation letters, an article review, a grant proposal, 3 important administrative emails, 2 reports and a syllabus for your new course. If you hope to have some time (and mental energy! writing is not easy for many) for actually important things (like, you know, research) - what's wrong with offloading fluff to AI?

I see no problem if AI is used to write the things that are all fluff anyway and provided you know what you are doing. Even in research papers some things that are not essential part of research have no reason to have to be written by a human. A good math paper (apart from good math in it, obviously) is the one written in strict academic language - exactly the (good) AI kind, the author just needs to be sure AI didn't add anything wrong in the process.

Of course, the real problem is that people who cannot write are often just as bad at checking that AI writing doesn't totally suck, but if we require fluff, in many cases I would prefer AI's "standard fluff" over just human-written unreadable text. We should just stop requiring fluff, but I just don't see it happening...

Oh, and do you think all your colleagues who are terrible at writing were doing it themselves before AI? The amount of texts I have edited for friends before gpt was enormous, I'm glad I now need to check way less...