[ai-control] Re: Proposed "AI System Inference" and "AI User Input" categories

[Nate Hake <[e-mail]>]

I am certainly happy to take the discussion in a particular order if the
chairs find it helpful. That said, the fundamental challenge is that some
of us strongly want the ability to express a preference as to *all*
inference. So a system category alone would be woefully insufficient from
my perspective.

To achieve full coverage, any contours we draw around what constitutes
“system” would need to have corresponding categories that cover whatever is
not “system.”

So I do frankly think it will be difficult to bifurcate the discussion
cleanly as these proposed categories are really meant to work in tandem.



***
Nate Hake
Founder
TravelLemming.com <https://travellemming.com/>

On Fri, Aug 7, 2026 at 17:46 Alissa Cooper <[e-mail]> wrote:

> From a process perspective it might be helpful to focus the discussion on
> system-directed inference and see if the group can find any sort of
> agreement on that category, and then come back around to the user-directed
> inference question. It would be helpful to see if progress can be made on
> the former without having to wade through the contention on the latter.
>
> Alissa
>
>
> On Aug 1, 2026, at 4:55 PM, Greg Lindahl <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> > Rights owners have expressed their need for a preference regarding AI
> inference opt-out since the start of this IETF project
>
> That's true -- and we have discussed it extensively. Let me remind you of
> an example from my past.
>
> I had a search engine in 2010. For many reasons we needed to
> implement "safe search", so that users who had not explicitly expressed a
> preference about naughty websites would not be surprised by the occasional
> naughty photos or text website.
>
> The standard implementation, back then, was to run every webpage in the
> response through AI inference. If the porn score was above a threshold, and
> if 80%+ of the top 10 results were above the threshold, then we would show
> the naughty results -- else we would suppress them.
>
> Without the ability to do AI inference, there's no good way to do safe
> search. If 1% of the web opted out of inference, the best solution is to
> never show those websites in search results.
>
> This is probably not what you expected.
>
> And this isn't a new issue, this is a situation from 16 years ago.
>
> -- greg (formerly CTO of blekko)
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2026 at 7:10 AM Laurent Le Meur <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Farzaneh,
>>
>> Rights owners have expressed their need for a preference regarding AI
>> inference opt-out since the start of this IETF project, and even before.
>> Such preference/control is already present in multiple opt-out models
>> (C2PA, RSL ...).
>>
>> Section 3.2 covers the fact that AI preferences may not be followed by
>> users and client systems. Therefore, the specification leaves the
>> evaluation of their impact on accessibility, translation, and other
>> user-beneficial features to the client systems and their users. Not us.
>> Thanks to section 3.2, the document you reference is now mainly of
>> interest to developers of client systems.
>>
>> Best regards
>> Laurent LE MEUR
>>
>>
>> Le 30 juil. 2026 à 15:02, Farzaneh Badiei <[e-mail]> a
>> écrit :
>>
>> One thing that warrants a long and in-depth discussion is that since the
>> beginning of this working group, some of us time and time again have warned
>> against having an inference category especially for the consumer. It can
>> have an impact the use of accessibility and translation features along with
>> many more issues. Meredith, Lila, Jo and myself have time and time again
>> raised these concerns in different shape and form. I raised them last week
>> as well.
>>
>> We had submitted this draft to illustrate some of the impact.
>> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-farzdusa-aipref-enduser-00.html
>>
>> In my opinion, we need to take a step back and before we discuss any
>> text, we should discuss the addition of inference, whether the group agrees
>> with it and under what circumstances the group agrees with adding
>> inference.
>>
>>
>>
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