Re: Dealing with LLMs in IETF discussions draft

"John Levine" <[email protected]> 31 Jul 2026 13:10:20 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.general
Organization Taughannock Networks
Message-ID <[email protected]>
It appears that Robert Sparks  <[email protected]> said:
>"Voice" in IETF email correspondence is a thing. We learn to read each 
>other's messages (like the very terse two above) in the "voice" of the 
>sender. It's part of why AI generated or restated content sticks out. 
>That idea is scattered through the draft, but not explicitly mentioned.

Beyond that, I usually skip AI messages because they're vacuous and wordy.
In our mailing lists, I rarely see a message from a human that is over a
screen long.  If you can't make your point concisely, you probably don't
understand it.

I haven't used LLMs much but when I do I invariably tell them to make
the result shorter, usually more than once.  That helps, but there's
still the question of whether it actually has anything to say.

R's,
John