silverpill@silverpill@mitra.social: @skavish It's hard to draw a line between machine-generated and machine-assisted.<br><br>Some open source projects now require contributors to disclose when a part of the work was done by a machine. I am wondering if we could use a similar approach with FEPs.

Home | Notifications | New Note | Local | Federated | Search | Logout

Note Detail

Reply to @silverpill@socialhub.activitypub.rocks
dima skavish@skavish@socialhub.activitypub.rocks (2026-03-27 02:46:40)
silverpill:Should machine-generated proposals be accepted?

I think we should figure out how to deal with them, because last week I processed 8 new proposals, and some of them had signs of being machine-generated.There’s a big difference between machine-generated and machine-assisted.

For example, I use LLMs to sanity-check ideas, find gaps, and polish wording, but the actual thinking and context are mine. In that case, calling it “machine-generated” feels wrong.

To me, the line is authorship: if the person understands, owns, and can defend the proposal, it should be fine. If it’s just AI output with little real understanding behind it, that’s where it becomes a problem.
---Reply---
silverpill@silverpill@mitra.social (2026-03-27 06:31:04)
@skavish It's hard to draw a line between machine-generated and machine-assisted.

Some open source projects now require contributors to disclose when a part of the work was done by a machine. I am wondering if we could use a similar approach with FEPs.


---Replies---

Steve Bate@stevebate@socialhub.activitypub.rocks (2026-03-27 14:00:43)
silverpill:@skavish It’s hard to draw a line between machine-generated and machine-assisted.I agree. That’s why I think @skavish ‘s suggestion is more apropos. silverpill:Some open source projects now require contributors to disclose when a part of the work was done by a machine. I am wondering if we could use a similar approach with FEPs.Spelling correction, grammar checking, markdown formatting, FEP template instantiation are all “work done by a machine”. And what’s the granularity of the disclosure (document, paragraph, sentence, phrase, word, general concept)?

I know you probably mean more specifically “work done by, or assisted by, an LLM” but I think this demonstrates the challenges in defining an effective policy. skavish:To me, the line is authorship: if the person understands, owns, and can defend the proposal, it should be fine. If it’s just AI output with little real understanding behind it, that’s where it becomes a problem.This sounds reasonable to me and I think this could be applied to both human and AI-assisted FEP output. The FEP process currently doesn’t require any minimum quality level for submissions. There are some I’ve seen with only a few paragraphs for a complex topic and where the author explicitly refuses to discuss it further. Those FEPs effectively die. I think the same thing would happen with a low-quality LLM-generated slop FEP that the submitter couldn’t or wouldn’t defend.