8 Jul
2026
8 Jul
'26
1:52 a.m.
Hi,
Le mardi 7 juillet 2026, 21:16:07 heure d’été d’Europe centrale Ralph Meijer a écrit :
[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.
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>), 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.
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.
Best,
Goffi