Re: We should require AI disclosure

On Wed, 8 Jul 2026 at 00:11, Ralph Meijer <[email protected]> wrote:
> If we do continue to allow it, what is the effect of declaring the use of AI on our processes? Should it cause a different treatment of the contribution? How?

Low-quality contributions are not new. What's changed is that they no
longer look like low-quality contributions. Identifying slop takes an
unfair amount of cognitive effort compared to the effort required to
generate and submit it.

Knowing that a XEP submission came in part or even wholly from LLM
output changes the way I review a document. LLMs are extremely good at
generating sensible-looking documents. If a sensible-looking document
comes from an experienced community member, I am likely to spend 80%
of my time assessing the higher level aspects of their submission - I
am not likely to cross-reference every namespace or referenced
document to see if they hallucinated it or not. One can certainly
argue that we should give every document a complete thorough review
right out of the gate, checking and cross-referencing everything, but
that's more effort than many of us can commit to and has never been
the case really. LLM documents tend to be longer, and this makes such
work even harder.

My request is not that we "ban AI", for now at least. Almost nobody
has called for that in this thread (surely far fewer than are worried
about its impact). In any case, I don't think we could pull that off -
"AI" is too broad, and these days is integrated into so many tools
right down to simple spelling/grammar checkers.

Instead, I am suggesting for many reasons already presented in this
thread, that we simply ask people to declare whether and how they used
AI in their contributions. If a submission says "this is entirely my
own work, but I used an LLM to review it" and another submission says
"this is output directly from an LLM, I've put no effort into checking
any of its contents" then I'm obviously going to treat those documents
very differently as a reviewer.

If nothing else, it will allow us to get an idea of how AI tools are
being used in our community. And things *could* be fine... if in 12
months we look back and see a bunch of in-progress documents with AI
use declared, but the documents are actually in great shape, then
we'll at least know we were worrying about nothing when it comes to
XEP quality. But if we consistently see that the documents authored
using AI are below our usual standards, then we can have further
discussions in the future about what kind/amount of AI usage is
appropriate in contributions. But right now, we're largely in the
dark, and that's scary. It leads to people jumping up and down every
time they see an emdash.

Regards,
Matthew
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