[Standards] Re: We should require AI disclosure

On 7 Jul 2026, at 22:48, Ralph Meijer <ralphm(a)ik.nu> wrote: While everything you say is true at face value, I think a number of people have seen an increase in low-effort low-quality high-magnitude contributions elsewhere because of the use of agents allowing producing significantly sized bodies of work that take a great deal of effort to review or repute, while having cost the person triggering the submission little to no effort. Daniel has made the (I think reasonable) point that he’s unlikely to be able to keep on as Editor if that role becomes having to process an increasing number of low-quality but not low-effort-to-deal-with submissions, and I think the onward effort of Council would also be prohibitive if such a situation were to arise. It’s a matter of opinion whether we’ll see that happen in the XSF, but I am confident similar things are happening elsewhere. We do, as you say, have a process that should prohibit unsuitable XEPs being published, but the effort required to drive that process may well increase - you would be right to assert that people could submit all the same things an agent could, by hand-crafting them, and the quality could be similarly low, but the barrier of effort to do that is much higher and we’ve not traditionally seen an issue with it (I also suspect that use of agents leads to an inflated confidence in the submitted content, but that’s just speculation) - and reading the GSoC mentor list this year has been particularly depressing with the tales of what it’s been like for everyone. Even within the XSF I have already watched some PRs go by that have been clearly (to me) agent-driven, and have felt draining to read. I do not have answers, I am not inherently anti-AI, and I do not believe that forbidding use of agents would be the best course, but I can also see how concerns in this area could be very reasonable, and that a desire to ‘do something’ following from that would also be reasonable /K