

I have tried some of the popular LLMs a few months back when I had to digitise an old policy document from which only an old scan still existed. I had trouble reading it.
The results varied wildly. OpenAI was really poor at it while Gemini got it right completely. I was quite impressed. ABBYY FineReader is supposed to be the best non-LLM software for OCR, but it doesn’t come near the performance of Gemini



I think it’s more nuanced than that. It all depends on what you’re asking it to do (and a bit of luck that it complies as intended). Using a thesaurus can also either improve or worsen a text.
I’m not a native English speaker, but have lived in an English speaking country for many years now. I still make mistakes, but there is no point in me asking for help with English writing as my mistakes are subtle and I don’t realise I made them. Getting an AI to detect clumsy use of English and grammar mistakes has worked quite well for me before publishing reports. While I don’t always use the correct grammar while writing, I’m very capable of judging whether an LLM suggested improvement is actually better.
Of course, letting an LLM rewrite a whole text is much riskier in terms of the original meaning getting lost. But that’s not the only way to use it.