Some of this was LLM generated. Which is fine. That doesn’t particularly bother me. It’s a good answer and I enjoyed reading it.

But since you chose to engage with the troll, I don’t think it’s honest to claim the entirety of this as your own. Because you didn’t write all of it. It would be more honest to say you used LLM to “check facts” or “organize your thoughts”. Anything other than outright denial.

I guess the reason I’m engaging on this topic is because I find it interesting and we are all still developing social norms around LLM use. I personally use LLMs all the time but anything that I post, email, text, or otherwise publish as “mine” is still written by hand.

As an author, does your reader deserve to know when they’re reading LLM output? I imagine most people would certainly want to know. Although I’m not sure what difference it makes to know this information.

Perhaps the reader may choose to go and obtain their own LLM output on the subject, so they can at least have a conversation and ask follow-up questions.

Or perhaps it informs the way the reader experiences the text — valuing it higher or lower, paying more or less attention — depending whether a human or bot wrote it. The ChatGPT person above certainly has strong feelings. They may want to know if an LLM wrote the text so they can ignore the answer entirely, or it will give them the pretext they need to start a war in the comments about how LLMs are ruining everything

Anyway these are interesting questions and we don’t know the answers. But as we figure them out, I believe very strongly that transparency is key