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Overleaf now incorporates an AI assistant, as of this morning. It is opt-out, not opt-in. I have very mixed feelings about this: and by "mixed", I mean ranging from annoyance to anger. www.overleaf.com/learn/how-to...

I can elaborate on why I think it's a bad idea (starting with the opt-out v. opt-in aspect). But it boils down to the fact that so far, all improvements I have seen thanks to the AI tools are papers that are smoother, but also less informative. Fewer typos and grammatical mistakes, but less content.

So in reality you're mostly annoyed because before you could use typos and grammatical errors as a proxy to detect weak papers due to some correlation between the two, whereas now it requires reading them carefully?

No! I don't mind the grammatical errors. They don't correlate with anything. I hate the fluff. I'd rather read something with typos than pages of nothing.

Of course. But on the other hand, language does matter. As an example, I'm reviewing a letters paper at the moment and my review is essentially going to be "guys, the English in your paper is so broken that I cannot decipher what you're doing. Please rewrite everything clearly and resubmit".

I think this is an entirely different level. If you cannot convey the basic message in the first place, adding layers of varnish won't help much. If you can, then varnish shouldn't be needed.