Putting aside the well-known issues with academic publication that this problem highlights, another aspect of modern publications more generally that LLMs are g

Putting aside the well-known issues with academic publication that this problem highlights, another aspect of modern publications more generally that LLMs are going to disrupt is word bloat. Too many words. For example, many academic papers are pages and pages of background, discussion, citations, etc. Very often the actual new material can fit on an index card + 1 figure. I understand why all the background is needed, in the abstract, but maybe this traditional way of thinking about incremental academic thought needs to shift in light of the reality of LLMs: LLMs will be used to write needless fluff. Indeed, it's what they're good at. I'm a patent attorney and I can say that the same thing applies there. Patents are enormous documents filled with legalese, background, description, vague, conditional language, etc. There are good legal reasons for that, but again, often the actual novel invention can fit on an index card. For that reason, it's self-evident to me that my job will be replaced, at least to some significant extent, by LLMs. But why not just cut out all the needless words? I could imagine patent law that added a "parsimony" requirement to patent filings. Examiners could reject filings that contained extraneous words. Then maybe patent lawyers would still be needed: to write the shortest possible patent that still contained the novelty. This is just a toy thought experiment, not a serious proposal. My point is that LLMs expose as trivially bankrupt some aspects of academic and patent writing (and probably other places: marketing copy, some nonfiction essay-style writing, etc.). Maybe LLMs will force us to embrace or even require brevity and conciseness to ensure that human beings stay in the loop.