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I have read so many papers and theses that desperately needed more skill with English than the authors or their universities had time or money for. (Mostly Finnish and Chinese natural sciences work.) The presentation hurt their solid substance. AI could help, since peeps read better than they write.

I’m still thinking through the ESL/Science thing, but I think that’s a bit different from what I mean in OP. If you write a paper in Finnish, hit “translate,” and then edit a bit, you are definitely the writer of that document. Otoh bullet points -> prose still seems wrong to me for science.

Authoring in Finnish and hitting "translate" wouldn't make a lot of sense due to so different writing traditions. While individual sentences might translate somehow, it would be missing the point. The way you think in English is simply different.

I wonder whether it would be to their advantage to prompt a model to produce a “literal translation.” Because a paper with clear signs of Chinese syntax is 1000% more prestigious right now than one with chatbot voice. I feel real gratitude when “Besides” is used to start a sentence.

This has really hit me when I give talks off-campus; lots of people who don't write well and can't realistically learn to--but still need to write emails, reports, some story that's inside them. Hard to tut-tut them, even if I don't want to offload my writing to it myself

Tbh I feel some contempt for the third use case. If the story was yours to tell, you would figure out a way to tell it yourself.

In the case I'm recalling, this was their way; putting in what notes they had and trusting the robot to put it together in a way that made sense. It's a challenge when you're in your seventies without a lot of education but want to leave a book about caring for a loved one with cancer