I'm in complete agreement with the idea that people should express themselves in their own words. But this collides with certain facts about U.S. adults (and students). This summary (https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...) reveals that:

* 28% of U.S. adults are at or below "level 1" literacy, essentially meaning people unable to function in an environment that requires written language skills.

* 54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.

These statistics refer to an inability to interpret written material, much less create it. As to the latter, a much smaller percentage of U.S. adults can compose a coherent sentence.

We're moving toward a world where people will default to reliance on LLMs to generate coherent writing, including college students, who according to recent reports are sometimes encouraged to rely on LLMs to complete their assignments.

If we care to, we can distinguish LLM output from that of a typical student: An LLM won't make the embarrassing grammatical and spelling errors that pepper modern students' prose.

Yesterday I saw this headline in a major online media outlet: "LLMs now exceed the intelect [sic] of the average human." You don't say.