Re: Proposed draft of an AI policy

>  What LLMs are undeniably exceptionally good at is producing plausible
text: text that a human reader will not immediately and obviously find
flawed.

Hmm...

What about the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of an AI model
to solve the 50-year-old problem of protein folding?
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/

And the recent solution to a 60-year-old  Erdős'  problem - something that
no mathematician could solve in 60 years?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amateur-armed-with-chatgpt-vibe-maths-a-60-year-old-problem/

Not only gold medals at the International Mathematics Olympiad, but a
useful accelerating tool in the work of many mathematicians, helping solve
hard problems that have remained unsolved for years.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-ai-revolution-in-math-has-arrived-20260413/

Having all these results and the current process that produced them, the
question arises:
Is it wise for a group of people  to intentionally isolate themselves from
a powerful tool that makes other people way more productive and helps them
produce new results and solve some of the hardest problems in a
record-short time? Form a closed society like monks in an isolated, remote
monastery?

Will it not be better to recognize the usefulness of these tools and start
applying them in a controlled manner to achieve results better and faster,
and even get unexpected ideas for new work?

Like the church that ignored Galileo's tool (the telescope) results and had
to admit its ignorance "only" 300+ years later?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

Let us think before we act...

Let us agree that the relevant distinction is not whether AI assisted in
producing the text, but whether the contributor deeply understands and
takes responsibility for the proposal.

To summarise:
The real unsolved question is whether or not a community can utilize the
acceleration benefits while preserving accountability and semantic
integrity?


Dimitre.

On Thu, May 28, 2026 at 4:25 AM Norm Tovey-Walsh <norm@saxonica.com> wrote:

> Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@gmail.com> writes:
> > The first question that naturally arises is how to implement such a
> policy in practice. Who, and using what mechanism, will judge
> > the originality of the work?
>
> There’s only one practical way for the community group to implement any
> policy: by what consensus the community group achieves.
>
> > This is a large and very important problem and at present entire
> organizations and specialized events are focusing on it.
>
> It is a large and important problem and I’m glad that organizations are
> working on it. There are lots of different aspects of the issue that we
> could discuss.
>
> I would rather not. I think there *are* a host of very good moral,
> ethical, environmental, and financial reasons to support the position that
> commercial LLMs are a blight on our industry and on the world generally.
> The first draft I wrote of the policy included a necessarily incomplete
> enumeration of some of them. I took at that out. I don’t think we need to
> debate those issues.
>
> I think there is a fundamental, technical issue that wholly and decisively
> justifies a policy against contributions that originated in any form of LLM.
>
> The task of our community group is to write a set of clear, coherent
> specifications. This is an objectively difficult task. Human authors start
> with a conceptual model of some feature that they believe the community
> group agrees with, or that they wish to persuade the community group to
> agree with. They attempt to describe that feature clearly in prose. Authors
> are more-or-less successful at this for a wide variety of reasons some
> within and some beyond their control.
>
> A reader starts with the prose and constructs their own model of the
> feature. Like authors, readers are more-or-less successful at this for a
> wide variety of reasons, the most significant of which is how clear and
> understandable they find the author’s prose.
>
> Members of the community group can compare the model they constructed from
> the prose with what they believe the community group discussed and/or
> agreed. The small subset of readers who are implementing the specification
> attempt to build software that performs the feature.
>
> The much broader community of readers decide if they believe they
> understand the feature and if they think it is applicable to the use case
> they have in mind. Then they compare what an implementation actually does
> with what they thought it was going to do.
>
> The community compares notes. Authors and readers collaborate on building
> an understandable specification. Sometimes defects are found in the
> feature. Sometimes defects are found in the description of the model.
> Sometimes they are found in implementations.
>
> The one through line in this entire process is that human authors are
> attempting to communicate their understanding of a feature to human readers.
>
> Specification prose that I draft sometimes contains Americanisms that some
> may find unfamiliar. Mike’s prose may sometimes contain Britishisms that I
> find unfamiliar. An author writing in their second, third, or fourth
> language may choose forms of expression that a native Enlish speaker would
> not.
>
> Careful human review of all these drafts, despite their various
> idiosyncracies, is valuable and justified by the fact that we are all
> attempting, in good faith, to communicate technical ideas that we believe
> we understand clearly, so that others can understand them.
>
> What LLMs are undeniably exceptionally good at is producing plausible
> text: text that a human reader will not immediately and obviously find
> flawed. But the LLM does not in any sense whatsoever *understand* the
> features of our language.
>
> Asking humans to review text generated in this way is unduly burdensome.
> Prose that reads well and appears to describe a feature, but on much closer
> inspection is internally inconsistent, or worse, simply vacuous, is
> corrosive to the process.
>
> Every one of us has a limited amount of time to read and review
> specifications. We must use that time wisely and constructively. Reviewing
> plausible text generated by a statistical process devoid of any actual
> understanding of the specifications is, objectively, technically, a poor
> use of our valuable time.
>
> We must have a policy that protects us from it.
>
>                                         Be seeing you,
>                                           norm
>
> --
> Norm Tovey-Walsh
> CEO, Saxonica
>
>