[Standards] Re: We should require AI disclosure

On Tue, 12 May 2026 at 19:24, Guus der Kinderen <guus.der.kinderen(a)gmail.com> wrote: "AI-assisted" falls under entirely different existing law than "AI-generated", at least in all jurisdictions I've looked at outside of the UK - we should be careful about which terms we're using here. In the US, something that is *entirely* AI-generated (ie, with no human assistance) would seem to be covered by the Thaler case. But that case hinged on the fact that Dr Thaler explicitly disclaimed authorship of the work. My gut feeling is that this was a deliberate test case, actually, since Dr Thaler had, after all, created the generative AI which in turn created the artwork, and could have quite reasonably claimed to be the author, but that wasn't the argument advanced. The US Copyright authority - I forget the name - has also rejected copyright claims for images generated (presumably from a single prompt) by Midjourney, an image generation tool, though this has not been tested in the US Courts. Based on this, so far, I would expect that a XEP produced from a single prompt, especially a trivial one, would not be copyrightable in the United States... But I also don't think it's possible to produce a XEP of sufficient quality that way. On the other hand, I think the two viable cases of LLM usage would be copyrightable here - again, I'm not a lawyer, but I have researched this quite heavily: 1) Use of an LLM to generate the initial skeleton of a XEP - filling in title, boilerplate, and some introductory paragraphs - the XEP would then have significant human editing. 2) Use of an LLM on a submission to tidy it up - cleaning up grammar, fixing inconsistent examples, even adding additional explanatory paragraphs. I think either of these or even both in combination would be copyrightable. The Thaler case depended on whether "human creativity" had been involved, and not whether AI had been. Dr Thaler insisted that human creativity had not been involved. (Since someone's bound to ask, and I accept this is all contentious, I write all my specs myself, but do find LLM reviews quite helpful to spot errors - which I correct manually. But I *like* writing, and I'm writing in my native language, I certainly won't judge others for using whatever tools make their lives easier) Note that it is entirely possible that the "additional explanatory paragraphs" I note above would be uncopyrightable in isolation - though that is definitely not clear from case law. But incorporating those into another work that *is* itself copyrightable would yield a work which is copyrightable - there is substantial case law to back that one up. The additional explanatory paragraphs - the pure AI generated text - could still be extracted without copyright, but the author need not identify which those are. Moreover, the slightest edit to those paragraphs turns them into a derivative work, and makes them (independently) copyrightable independently. However - and I think this is key from a purely legal perspective - none of this is an issue about AI, it's an issue about uncopyrightable text. If you want to research this, don't ask about AI - ask about Shakespeare, which is out of copyright. Just as well we don't use any of *that* in our specifications... I think this is a very good point - what's the outcome of the XSF publishing something that is entirely uncopyrightable (and, as I say, this is very hypothetical)? We publish XEPs widely, under a highly permissive licence, that allows essentially any use. The only restriction we have is, in fact, our copyright. Claiming a copyright that one does not in fact possess carries a legal risk, though honestly I have no idea what the recourse would be here. There's almost nothing that would change, really, so I'd argue our legal exposure is very low. But I think it's avoidable. Peter Saint-Andre has argued before that we should simply disclaim copyright (and require submissions to do the same) - this would eliminate the problem entirely. We could quite conceivably do something in the middle. If a submitter has to say something along the lines of: "In as much as copyright exists in this contribution, the submitter asserts and warrants they have permission granted by all copyright holders to assign it in perpetuity to the XSF; furthermore it is hereby assigned to the XSF" ... you need more than this but you get the idea hopefully - and the XSF publishes XEPs with, in Appendix C's Section "Copyright": "To the extent that Copyright may be asserted, this XMPP Extension Protocol is copyright © 1999 – 2024 by the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF)." Then that might be sufficient to allow for entirely uncopyrightable XEPs to be published safely. I'm not sure the second bit - the XSF copyright statement change - needs to happen, in fact. Simply publishing a Submission is, I think, enough to make it copyrightable even if all the text in it isn't. Note two things: 1) I don't think uncopyrightable XEPs can exist from AI, at the very least for the foreseeable future. 2) Nevertheless, this covers cases such as the original author putting a spec in the public domain, and then submitting it (or someone else doing so). That's a much more practical and legally clear way to get into this situation. Legal advice should be sought on this, though, obviously. Dave.