Re: [PHP-DEV] AI generated mails

On Sun, 23 Aug 2026, Osama Aldemeery wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 4:21 PM Christian Schneider <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> > In the thead "[PHP-DEV] [RFC] [Discussion] array_match" I got a 
> > reply starting with "Thanks for your feedback and for raising these 
> > valid points" and then sort of reiterating things I already 
> > addressed ("requires adding delimiters and wrapping the needle in 
> > `preg_quote()`") which leads me to believe that the response was AI 
> > generated. I might be wrong in this specific case but it got me 
> > thinking.
> >
> > I'm not sure I want to spend time arguing with AIs and was 
> > considering replying with "AI;DR" (AI; didn't reply) but I realize 
> > that this can be considered rude.

I think that replying with "AI;DR" is less rude than expecting all 1199 
receivers on this list to want to read overly long-winded LLM generated 
text, where seamingly the human-written text from one contributor gets 
fed into a sloperator to get a reply.

> > Just to be clear: I realize that AIs help a lot for non-native 
> > speakers to express themselves but when I get the feeling that the 
> > whole argument was generated and not only translated then I get a 
> > bit defensive about my personal time and energy.
> >
> > As I'm expecting more and more generated mails on this list: What is 
> > the feeling on the mailing list about how to handle this?
> 
> Since this isn't the first time this has come up, I'd like to ask 
> whether it's time internals discussed an AI-usage policy?

Yes, this is long overdue.

For now, I will talk about this mailinglist first (and only).

With that, we end up with drivel like this: 
https://externals.io/message/132300#132332 (au contraire the acceptance 
to not do this, as per https://externals.io/message/132300#132317).

This is a list for *people* to discuss the PHP language, its features, 
and its policies.

Therefore, a policy for this list ought to be that you *have* to write 
the content yourself. If that means writing it in non-English and 
feeding it through a *translating-LLM* only, that that seems reasonable.

What does not seem reasonable is to ask a tool to write the text for 
you, and then copy and pasting this as a reply to this list — especially 
because it doesn't deal with the trimming and quoting (as per our 
guidelines at 
https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/docs/mailinglist-rules.md ).

cheers,
Derick