It depends on your level of expertise. If your writing skills are awful, boosting that with below average AI-slop is actually an improvement. The output won’t be good, but at least it isn’t awful either. If you already are a competent writer, LLMs will absolutely ruin your text.

However, the middle ground is where it gets interesting. You should start with a rough draft. It doesn’t have to be concise, coherent or even good. It’s just a starting point for the LLM to work with. It’s important that the draft illustrates the vision you’re going for.

If you tell an LLM to improve it, it will usually make some dramatic changes you won’t like, but some of them kinda work. Then you’ll become an editor, and your job is to merge the two texts. Take the best parts from your original and the one the LLM “refined” for you.

This method requires you to have a vision though, and you need to know what you want. Your job is to curate the material. Discard the trash and keep anything worth keeping. You need to have the ability to determine what’s good and what’s not. Fortunately, that’s a skill you can develop by reading material written by other people.