[Standards] Re: We should require AI disclosure

On Wed, 8 Jul 2026 at 00:11, Ralph Meijer <ralphm(a)ik.nu> wrote: Low-quality contributions are not new. What's changed is that they no longer look like low-quality contributions. Identifying slop takes an unfair amount of cognitive effort compared to the effort required to generate and submit it. Knowing that a XEP submission came in part or even wholly from LLM output changes the way I review a document. LLMs are extremely good at generating sensible-looking documents. If a sensible-looking document comes from an experienced community member, I am likely to spend 80% of my time assessing the higher level aspects of their submission - I am not likely to cross-reference every namespace or referenced document to see if they hallucinated it or not. One can certainly argue that we should give every document a complete thorough review right out of the gate, checking and cross-referencing everything, but that's more effort than many of us can commit to and has never been the case really. LLM documents tend to be longer, and this makes such work even harder. My request is not that we "ban AI", for now at least. Almost nobody has called for that in this thread (surely far fewer than are worried about its impact). In any case, I don't think we could pull that off - "AI" is too broad, and these days is integrated into so many tools right down to simple spelling/grammar checkers. Instead, I am suggesting for many reasons already presented in this thread, that we simply ask people to declare whether and how they used AI in their contributions. If a submission says "this is entirely my own work, but I used an LLM to review it" and another submission says "this is output directly from an LLM, I've put no effort into checking any of its contents" then I'm obviously going to treat those documents very differently as a reviewer. If nothing else, it will allow us to get an idea of how AI tools are being used in our community. And things *could* be fine... if in 12 months we look back and see a bunch of in-progress documents with AI use declared, but the documents are actually in great shape, then we'll at least know we were worrying about nothing when it comes to XEP quality. But if we consistently see that the documents authored using AI are below our usual standards, then we can have further discussions in the future about what kind/amount of AI usage is appropriate in contributions. But right now, we're largely in the dark, and that's scary. It leads to people jumping up and down every time they see an emdash. Regards, Matthew