8 Jul
2026
8 Jul
'26
2:57 a.m.
On Wed, 8 Jul 2026 at 08:52, Goffi <goffi(a)goffi.org> wrote:
The odd thing is, producing a lot of content has always been easier than
producing tight, well-considered, content.
“If it is a ten‑minute speech, it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it.
If it is a half‑hour speech, it takes me a week. If I can talk as long as I
want to, it requires no preparation at all.” -- Woodrow Wilson
Also Mark Twain, and Blaise Pascal's “I have made this letter longer than
usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.” from 1657.
The problem with AI slop isn't that an AI wrote it per-se, but that AI
makes it much easier to write slop than before. But slop was always easier
to write - and harder to read - than quality submissions.
I may find myself repeating this, but really, it's a matter of scale.
Again, this seems like a problem of scale more than anything else.
... scale ...?
Again, to echo previous messages, let's fix the process such that the
review by five (and hopefully more) busy people doesn't happen right at the
entrypoint of the standards pipeline. This has always been something of a
waste of valuable resources, and this is compounding fast. If this gate
happens later, based on factors like visible interest in the community,
then the very real detrimental effect of AI slop is considerably lessened.
Hi,
Le mardi 7 juillet 2026, 21:16:07 heure d’été d’Europe centrale Ralph
Meijer a écrit :
Right - this is a potential problem of scale.
[SNIP]
I do not see why these problems uniquely exist because of the use of AI,
and why
this isn't covered by an author's existing responsibility to ensure
quality and the pre-conditions for assigning ownership rights to the XSF
per its IPR policy (in particular sections 3.1 and 3.2).
The scale and effort required is not the same with AI.
If you cannot
formulate the requirements for quality for humans, then
how does declaring use of
AI make things better? And if you can, and a
submission complies, how does it matter that AI was used in the process?
How would you handle “AI-tainted” submissions differently?
I would read it differently. If I know that a whole section is AI written,
I know that the text and references can be hallucinated, and that there can
be more boilerplate text than a human would do.
If AI is used to extract table or make examples, I'll probably check
quickly for hallucinated values.
If AI is used for slight reformulation and spelling/grammar, I'll probably
read it no differently as I read pure human submission.
If a request is slop (low effort fully generated AI), I'll probably not
bother and reject it.
In any case, I would appreciate and consider polite to
be informed if I'm
reading a human or machine generated content.
I can't find one that says AI wasn't used, and nor can I find any that say
AI output wasn't reviewed (carefully!) afterward. Going through them is
quite painful, I might have missed one, but I went through the first ten or
so which seemed representative.
Which is about what I'd expect - who's going to declare they used AI and
also declare they didn't check anything about the output? (I mean, I do
this in throwaway code, but in a spec submission?) Equally, if someone
AI-slop-generates a 60 page XEP that look vaguely pausible enough to suck
you in, are they going to declare this accurately?
Technically speaking, this isn't so much an Evil Bit as a Good Bit that
everyone will set.
Charitably, we could say this is keeping honest people honest, but it might
be more accurate to say it's simply performative.
And this is all unfortunate because I entirely understand your concerns,
and firmly believe these are real problems that we should protect Editor
and Council from, but I don't think a declaration is an effective way of
doing this.
The same holds for potential rights issues. The
author is still
responsible.
My concern is that all future submissions will just have this disclosure
as
boilerplate, and a recipient cannot assess how deep the impact of the
use of AI is. With the accelerating growth we see in both the capabilities
and the use of AI, this becomes increasingly hard. We will not have gained
anything substantial. In that regard it reminds me of the Evil Bit (RFC
3514) / Malicious Stanzas (XEP-0076).
This is not what I'm seeing in other projects. Even the local inference
engine "llama.cpp", which we can hardly accuse to be "anti-AI", ask
for
that, you can check PRs there: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pulls
The statement you linked to seems like common sense and doesn't actually
require disclosure. Consider this document again, but conceptually replace
“the use of AI” with the “use of a keyboard”. Does having such a statement
change the outcome of our standards process?
This is a very poor comparison. It's like saying "I don't see why we need
a driving license, I don't need one to walk". The scale is not the same,
with LLM you can generate easily tons of text looking on the surface more
or less OK.
I think that
our author guidelines (XEP-0143) are already clear, and
sense all the above boils
down to this:
“Authors must understand, verify, and take responsibility for every
contribution they submit.” (-- ChatGPT with my prompting)
While noting that this stance is not universally accepted (e.g. see <
https://jme.bmj.com/content/51/4/230>)t;), I think it is suitable for our
standards process. Feel free to use this phrase in a concrete proposal,
like a PR to XEP-0143.
To clarify my (current) position: I'm not asking for an AI ban, it could
not be enforceable and AI is a great tool for accessibility and many other
things. But I'm advocating for requesting a disclosure (maybe not
mandatory, but strongly suggested). Explain that we have human reviewers
behind, and that we'll reject AI slops specifications. Use of AI need to be
fully checked, and text should be reduced to essential. The later is one of
the main painful point with content generated by or with AI: it's longer
than necessary, and that make it harder to review.
We could start to have this as a template/popup when
doing a pull-request.
That's not sarcasm, actually, it's a reductio ad absurdum argument, though
the two look similar. Below is an example of a parody argument (again,
similar to both). Both are examples of the legitimate form of
slippery-slope arguments (or over-literalism, if you prefer). In other
words, you might or might not find it funny, but it is (aimed at) making a
valid point.
Dave.
--
This email was generated by a human, and therefore may contain mistakes.
Disclosure: this message was manually (glide)
typed on a OnePlus 12,
using Google Board, in Thunderbird for Android. Conversing
with AI may have
influenced my thought process. Except where explicitly noted, no excerpts
of other works were included in this message.
No need to be sarcastic here, this is a problem seen across the whole
industry, it seems legitimate to me to state our position, like many other
organisations are doing.