Re: AI disclosure [was: AI slop "contributions" to IETF working groups]

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 2/15/2026 11:28 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 16/02/2026 07:53, Michael Richardson wrote:
>>
>> John Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>      > With copyrights, unlike patents, if you create something 
>> similar to another
>>      > work, but independently of the other work, that is OK. Back in 
>> the PC era there
>>      > were elaborate "clean rooms" used to write PC BIOS code 
>> equivalent to the IBM
>>      > PC's but without looking at the original. But if an LLM is 
>> trained on something,
>>      > and you use output from that LLM, is that enough of a 
>> connection? How much do we
>>      > want to spend to find out?
>>
>> How much do we want to risk if things turn out poorly for the LLMs?
>> It seems to me that the lowest risk thing for the IETF to do is to 
>> decline
>> "help" from these plagirism systems.
>
> How can the IETF do that? I can't get past the idea that all we can do 
> is ask
> contributors to state whether a contribution is AI-generated.

Define generated?

Yes, some LLM output is entirely prompt based. The workflow that I 
observe is that the human author will start with a prompt, and then 
iterate, progressively refining the prompt until getting an acceptable 
result. After how many iterations of prompt/observe/refine is the result 
still "AI generated"?

But that's certainly not the only workflow. Another one would be for the 
human author to write a draft, and then ask the LLM to improve it. Is 
that AI generated"?

Yes another workflow is to do something like that paragraph by 
paragraph, resulting in a mix of human written and partially AI 
generated paragraphs. Is that "AI generated?"

And then you have the workflow in which the human author starts typing 
the beginning of a sentence, and the AI helper proposes a continuation 
that the author may or may not accept. One could argue that each 
sentence in the document is either written or approved by the author. Is 
that still "AI generated"?

We have a valid concern about copyright and plagiarism. I think we 
should express us in these terms, rather than the blunt approach "is 
this AI generated?"

-- Christian Huitema





>
> It does seem to me that we need something added to the Note Well ASAP. 
> Is the
> IESG paying attention?