Re: Dealing with LLMs in IETF discussions draft

> Il 31/07/2026 03:20 CEST Stephen Farrell <[email protected]> ha scritto:
> 
> Meanwhile, we'd be v. interested in any comments here or
> on the github repo [2].

My first comment after a quick read: the draft only marginally touches what I see as the main current problem created by LLM users, that is, overwhelming non-AI-assisted participants with overlong drafts and list messages that they can't keep up with. We just had an example in DNSOP, which in the end forced the chairs to moderate away the author, as a lot of people could not keep up with his (its?) overlong and over-frequent messages.

Transparency on the use of AI will not solve this problem. Perhaps, things would become more manageable if all participants used AI to parse the messages, but not everyone can do that today; such a factual requirement would introduce discriminations among participants depending on:
- level of skill in this specific technology
- availability of time and resources to set up AI assistance for IETF work
- availability of money to pay for significant model usage (like parsing and summarizing all messages from high volume mailing lists)
- availability and quality of LLM/AI services and software in their country of origin

Moreover, even if these problems could be solved for everyone, not every IETF participant is able or willing to commit the amount of energy and resources that it takes to conceive and set up a "personal AI assistant" just to be able to continue participating in the IETF.

Perhaps this will change in the future, but at the current state of deployment of this technology, I think we should not allow its use to generate text that goes directly to a mailing list, except for same length correction or translation into English of text originally written by a human. Same for Internet drafts, except maybe the boring descriptive parts (e.g. tables or BNF).

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[email protected]
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy