Re: Proposed draft of an AI policy

I personally have been a slow adopter of the LLM flavour of AI, largely because I'm generally a late adopter of most technologies; I like to wait until the hype has settled.

And I've only really used it as a "smart Google" - to get answers to technical questions where conventional approaches weren't successful. In that context, I've found the answers extremely impressive, especially as my questions are typically on very obscure topics.

Also, of course, I use whatever coding assistants are embedded in my IDE (IntelliJ). There too the technology has clearly been advancing rapidly and often delivers very impressive suggestions for code improvement (which I never accept without careful manual checking).

Our key mission is to produce high quality specifications, and to achieve that, I think the key factor is that we can't accept any proposal to change the specs unless it is practically feasible to check it by hand. I'm sure, for example, that an LLM could do a pretty good job of of re-arranging the XQuery spec in a more logical order, but there's no way we would be able to check that it hadn't inadvertently changed anything. Our rationale for rejecting such a proposal would be our inability to check it, not the way that it was produced.

I might note that even without AI, there are proposals where human verifiability is hard to achieve: this is particularly true of the grammar, where throughout the development of XQuery we have had a handful of experts who have understood how to apply technology to the task of defining a bug-free grammar. I think we value these tools because they are deterministic and follow provably correct algorithms, which is a very far cry from the kind of reasoning used by LLMs.

As far as the ethical arguments are concerned, I don't feel it is appropriate for the working group to attempt to control how contributors do their work: we are only concerned with the quality of the inputs that they submit (we also have to consider whether we have the resources to handle the quantity of inputs - something that is affecting many open source GitHub projects). In any case, the boundary between AI tools and non-AI tools is pretty fuzzy, especially when it comes to things like spellling and grammar correction. We can't really go telling people that they are allowed to use a grammar checker so long as it's a stupid one. Christian's point about non-native speakers is also relevant: assistive technologies are greatly benefiting from AI and are helping to level the playing field for participation, a trend which we can only welcome.

Norm and Bethan have marshalled some very persuasive arguments that should influence us as individual contributors. I'm conscious that the LLM services we are being offered are being sold at way below their true cost in order to get us all addicted. I also have fears for the future, of how LLMs will be trained when the internet becomes dominated by slop. There are clear arguments for political regulation of the technology. 

But in the meantime, if someone produces a PR that aims to improve our grammatical consistency, or to correct errors in example code, or perhaps to identify changes we have made to the 3.1 specs that we haven't highlighted in the changes appendix, I think we should judge it on its face value (by careful review of the proposal content), and not by the amount of help that the author got from software tools, or the number of kWh that those tools consumed in the process.

Michael Kay

Received on Friday, 29 May 2026 22:33:27 UTC