8 Jul
2026
8 Jul
'26
10:13 a.m.
On 08/07/2026 09.52, Goffi wrote:
What criteria do you use to make these
judgements. Why is there an
assumption that if a human created it, you do not have to be as thorough?
I agree that allowing submissions by PR makes it easier for agents and
people to submit them and that may contribute to increased volume. I
also think that code is different from protocol specifications. But as I
mentioned above, if you cannot triage quickly, this requires changes to how
heavy your triage process is. I do not see how an optional declaration
makes any of this better.
I love car analogies. No, my suggestion is more like you asking how I
got to the XMPP Summit, and you valuing me differently when I came by
car. Besides your personal preferences, this should not have any bearing
on my contributions in that venue. And I will certainly not show you my
drivers license or discuss its impact on the environment _in that context_.
As I
wrote earlier, if you can provide concrete changes to, say,
XEP-0143, I would be happy to judge them on face value. I am fine with
stronger indication of the responsibilities we require of authors (like
my proposed text). Preferably, you still need to define how you "reject
AI slops" using objective criteria. If "gut feeling" is the process,
then you can already do this.
FWIW, the paper I referenced is an in-depth discussion on the
responsibilities of human authors on scientific papers, which should be
an interesting read for anyone that wants to seriously discuss this
topic. There are rebuttals to it, too, but unfortunately they are not as
open-access as this CC-licensed paper.
This was not meant as a sarcastic jab at all. It was meant as a concrete
example of how hard it is to usefully declare the use of AI. I
specifically mentioned Google Board and glide typing, because it uses
machine learning and AI for writing each word based on how you glide. It
has auto-correction, spell checks, etc. I didn't run the whole text
through an LLM myself to correct my writing, though, and so there should
be no hallucinations (other than my own) or unsupported citations.
If you want to have optional declarations of the use of AI, then you
also need to specify what that declaration could look like. If it is
free-form, then you will get things like my example.
ralphm
Hi,
Le mardi 7 juillet 2026, 21:16:07 heure d’été d’Europe centrale Ralph Meijer a écrit :
In creating the contribution, this may be true. Like Dave commented
elsewhere in the thread today, I am not convinced about increased effort
on triaging (initial submission) or review of individual XEPs to move
between states. If you mean the volume of submissions or XEP PRs, then
we need to figure out how to lighten that effort. In the past, for
example, PRs were not the approach to getting a XEP changed. You'd
discuss your suggestions with the author(s) and then they would make
changes. The Editor might be involved, but there is no such requirement
unless (about) to move between states.
I agree with Dave that putting all the scrutiny at the beginning of your
process (unlike before) does not help. Instead, accepting a new
contribution with light review allows the distribution of the load to
the rest of Standards JIG. I.e. people will start reading, commenting,
attempting to implement, etc.
[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.