Re: Dealing with LLMs in IETF discussions draft

Comments inline

On Thu, 6 Aug 2026 at 20:24, Jay Daley <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Stephen, Chong
>
> > We just pushed a -01 version of the draft [1] that lists
> > (most of) the arguments raised on the list as that may be
> > a more useful starting point for a discussion on a new
> > list.
>
> Thanks for this.
>
> The one big thing the document does not tackle is the assertion that where
> the AI introduces something the human did not know about, then the human
> will inevitably trade off their own understanding of that for the
> acceleration of output that AIs enable.
>
>
> In addition, the hypothesis of section 4 of the document relies on two
> pillars that I think obscure the real issues:
>
> 1. The claim that only humans can create new knowledge, but not AIs, and
> that is what is being introduced by the human into the discourse:
>
> > Genuine innovation --- the creation of new conceptual territory rather
> than more efficient mapping of existing terrain --- remains a human
> capacity.
>
>
> > The symmetry is clean: humans originate, AI executes. Humans open new
> territory; AI operates efficiently within it.
>
>
> I doubt very much if every message sent with the use of an AI is creating
> new knowledge rather than applying existing knowledge and would be
> surprised if it happens at all.  Engineering is, by definition, the
> application of existing knowledge to new problems.  It is more likely that
> authors who think this is happening are mistaking knowledge that is new to
> them as knowledge that is new to humanity.
>
> We could always test it by asking an AI "is this message introducing any
> genuine innovation or is it just applying existing knowledge?"
>
> 2.  The claim that the human being the decision maker somehow shapes what
> is said:
>
> > the AI is functioning as a thinking partner within a bounded space, not
> as an originator. The human remains the decision-maker about what to accept
> and what to discard. What falls outside this paradigm is delegating the
> thinking itself: asking AI what position to take, what arguments to make,
> or what conclusions to draw
>
> The key point that is being obscured there is that the AI will inevitably
> be introducing that human to concepts that are new to that human and if
> they are incorporated in any way, either directly or by linkage/comparison,
> then the AI is responsible for that innovation not the human.  This is
> exactly the same as if I were to sit down with an expert in a particular
> field and discuss my proposed email with them and then ask them to draft if
> for me.
>
>
Ultimately, I don't think many of us can claim to know much beyond what
others have imparted to us anyway. Even the self-taught autodidacts surely
started by reading through something of personal interest that someone else
first discussed, and then experimenting from there.

In this case, I honestly don't see the situation as dramatically different
from an informal web search. We have not and do not typically cite every
signal piece of knowledge we share that's new to us despite having access
to web search, Wikipedia and/or say TV Tropes for figurative eons.

And much like I personally often saw Wikipedia as a useful jumping off
point, I'm sure we know plenty of people who treat a two-minute read of a
Wikipedia article as having 'done their research' enough to speak
confidently on a subject they don't really have the means to understand
yet.

What's different, perhaps, is an LLM's conversational nature, which allows
for much faster traversal of a topic. This, combined with AI's unguarded
propensity to make stuff up while speaking as confidently as a genuine
expert (who might otherwise know when to say "I don't know") creates some
genuine risks when neither party in the exchange has enough information to
make informed decisions about what was just reviewed.

But where someone learns something genuinely new to them and then composes
it with another existing system to introduce some productive novel effect?


> This conversation has made it clear to me that this is about so much more
> than someone putting their name to the output and taking responsibility for
> it, because it seems as if the boundary between what the AI introduced and
> what the human introduced is hard for the human to self-identify.


In that case, while deeply fascinating to me personally, I am not sure why
it would matter so much if it was AI, Wikipedia, a book or a magazine that
first made them wise to the subject matter.

Cheers,
Nathanael


>
> Jay
>
>
> --
> Jay Daley
> [email protected]
> www.ietf.org
>
>
>
>
>