Re: Concern about AI-generated contributions in VCWG discussions

Good experiment, Moses. I'll be very curious to see the results.

FWIW, I have been trying to hold myself to the following standard:
https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/ai-coca.html

The part that I'm not sure about is: "I will acknowledge the AI’s
contribution according to the reasonable expectations of my audience." Are
"the reasonable expectations of my audience" shifting? Should they? On
several technical papers I've written recently, I've found that AI helps me
articulate complex ideas a lot faster than I could do on my own -- but the
ideas are still entirely from me, and I take responsibility for them. Even
the AI's language is highly constrained by the guidelines I give, the other
content I have written as starters for the piece, and by my own substantial
post-edits. So I haven't credited an AI. Was this the right call? I'm not
sure. Here is how I described the contributions of myself and AIs on a
recent album I released with suno's help (where my contribution was mostly
as a lyricist): https://sivanea.com/ai-collab. When I shared the album with
FB friends (along with the same caveats about how much of the album came
from me versus AI), one of my friends who's a musician told me he felt
discouraged because he had worked for years to play the guitar as nicely as
the guitar riff in one of my songs -- it didn't matter that I was
transparent, it still felt uncomfortable. And I get it. He's not wrong. And
yet, I feel like I found a creative outlet that was meaningful and
absolutely represents my own investment and personality, too...

I guess this is something we'll be wrestling with for a while...

On Sat, Feb 14, 2026 at 1:19 PM Moses Ma <moses.ma@futurelabconsulting.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Just as an experiment, I’m providing two responses, one written
> organically and the other was generated by an LLM. Please vote on which you
> think is human generated? Doing this is allowing me to explorethe nature of
> human versus AI generated content.
>
> Vote here: *https://forms.gle/42mWD8HAouAhM9kVA*
> <https://forms.gle/42mWD8HAouAhM9kVA>
>
> I'll reply with the survey results in about a week.
>
> Moses
>
> ---
>
> Version A:
>
> I am also worried about the slopification of not only this forum, but the
> entire practice of strategic collaboration. First, I recently wrote
> something where there was concern that my work was AI generated simply
> because I used em dashes—I tend to use them a lot, as it offers the reading
> equivalent of a thoughtful pause. I had to use an AI detector on an
> extensive article I blogged ten years ago to show that my natural writing
> style triggered the detector, when it was simply, well, good writing. (The
> article I blogged received over half a million page views.) I subsequently
> discovered that most “humanizers” simply inject words less likely ones, to
> appear human generated by reducing the quality of the writing.
>
> The reality is that AI tools are now part of the cognitive environment.
> Clearly, the key issue isn’t “used an LLM” vs “didn’t use an LLM.” It’s
> authorship and responsibility. If someone uses a model to structure
> thoughts, tighten prose, and check logic — but the ideas, judgments, and
> commitments are theirs — that’s still meaningful participation. If the
> model is doing the thinking, and the human is just "phoning it in" by
> forwarding output, then yes, we’re drifting toward a lot more than just
> model collapse
>
> The other issue is where we’re heading. Just as AI generated coding and
> video have crossed their critical thresholds of realism, collaborative
> ideation will also do so within a few years. As LLMs have slowly
> transitioned from “stochastic plagiarism” to the use of reasoning models,
> they will at some point cross a similar threshold, the "uncanny valley" of
> cognitive realism. Especially when multi-agent systems start emulating what
> we do here. At that point, our internal slop detectors—even set to high
> sensitivity so anything we read could “feel” AI generated—will not be able
> to tell the difference.
>
> Version B:
>
> Thanks for raising this. I think you're pointing at something real and
> worth discussing openly.
>
> The distinction you draw between using an LLM as a tool and outsourcing
> your thinking to one is important, and I'd argue it's actually sharper than
> it might first appear. Proofreading preserves the structure of your
> reasoning while cleaning up expression. Generation replaces the reasoning
> itself. Those are fundamentally different activities, even if the output
> can sometimes look similar on the surface.
>
> Where I think this gets genuinely difficult is that the line isn't always
> clean. Someone might use an LLM to help organize scattered thoughts into a
> coherent draft, then revise it substantially. That's somewhere in the
> middle, and I'd hesitate to call it illegitimate. The question probably
> isn't whether an LLM touched the text at all, but whether the person behind
> it actually wrestled with the problem, made judgment calls, and can defend
> what they wrote if pressed.
>
> That said, I think the practical concern you're raising stands regardless
> of where we draw the line. When responses on a list like this start reading
> like they were produced by someone who spent 30 seconds prompting rather
> than 30 minutes thinking, it does erode trust. You start reading
> differently. You skim more. You engage less. And that's corrosive to
> exactly the kind of deliberation this group exists for.
>
> I don't know what the right intervention is. Norms are probably more
> useful than rules here. Something like: if you wouldn't be comfortable
> explaining and defending every claim in your message during a live
> conversation, maybe reconsider sending it. That's not a perfect filter, but
> it at least recenters the expectation that contributions reflect genuine
> engagement rather than generated fluency.
>
>
>
> On 2/13/26 3:41 AM, Filip Kolarik wrote:
>
> Dear VCWG,
> I want to raise a concern that’s been bothering me lately. It feels like
> this mailing list is being flooded by LLM-generated responses.
>
> Whether or not that’s intentional, meaningful work depends on people
> engaging directly with arguments and tradeoffs, and when contributions read
> like synthesized summaries rather than considered positions, the discussion
> loses clarity and momentum.
>
> I’m not arguing against using tools; I use LLMs to proofread my own
> writing. But there is a difference between proofreading text you wrote and
> letting an LLM generate the entire response. If normalized, we risk
> damaging the effectiveness of the group and turning this mailing list into
> a swamp to be ignored.
>
> Best regards,
> Filip
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipkolarik/
>
>
> --
> *Moses Ma | Managing Partner*
> moses.ma@futurelabconsulting.com (public) | moses@futurelab.venture
> (private)
> v+1.415.568.1068 | allmylinks.com/moses-ma
>
>
>