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Re: AI slop "contributions" to IETF working groups

Behcet Sarikaya <sarikaya2012@gmail.com> Wed, 11 February 2026 17:28 UTC

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From: Behcet Sarikaya <sarikaya2012@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:26:14 -0600
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Subject: Re: AI slop "contributions" to IETF working groups
To: Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@hallambaker.com>
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CC: Rob Sayre <sayrer@gmail.com>, IETF discussion list <ietf@ietf.org>
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On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 12:53 PM Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@hallambaker.com>
wrote:

> LLMs aren't really Artificial Intelligence, they are SI, Superficial
> Intelligence.
>
> The reason SI is so popular in the management class is that most got where
> they were through superficial expertise all along. People who got where
> they are through bluffing are usually unable to believe anyone else knows
> what they are talking about.
>
> Back in the days of the Soviet Union, it was much safer to investigate
> obvious nonsense like parapsychology because everyone in the field knew
> they were a fraud and there was very little risk of being called out for
> making a 'mistake'. It was the hard scientists who went to the gulag for
> discovering that the remote viewing and psychic interrogation techniques
> didn't work.
>
> There are real applications but just like in the early years after the
> discovery of radium, the number of people applying it to things that were
> bad or actively dangerous was vastly higher than the number of valid uses.
> Hence that time I got the fit of my shoes checked with an X-Ray machine
> when I was a child.
>
> Summarizing lists of data is a task it seems to do pretty well. But it
> needs a skilled operator to craft the prompt. A use I was considering was
> for a Quora like forum in which a user asking a question like 'where do I
> find the paint for R2D2s blue parts' would be asked if an AI generated
> response answered their question. The main goal being to reduce the number
> of tedious posts attacking people for asking questions that have been asked
> before which are usually vastly more of an annoyance than the original
> question.
>
>
>
Wow! Only Philip can write this.

Behcet



>
> On Sat, Feb 7, 2026 at 6:50 PM Rob Sayre <sayrer@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org> wrote:
>> > Are there any general IETF guidelines for how to use LLMs
>> > constructively? (Or have I finally attained pure dinosaur status by not
>> > hopping on the llm bandwagon?)
>>
>> They explore things very broadly and very quickly, but they are
>> unreliable narrators.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
>>
>> So, they are a fine tool to use, especially when picking through mounds
>> of data. But sending it to the list unedited is another problem:
>>
>>
>> https://www.amjcounselling.com/amj-blog/2015/03/24/contempt-for-reader-you-are-showing
>>
>> Not a bad treatment. Contempt for the reader. So, you take the Blaise
>> Pascal quote typically translated as
>>
>> "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
>>
>> But it says:
>>
>> "I wouldn't have made this one so long if I'd had the leisure to make it
>> shorter." ("Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu
>> le loisir de la faire plus courte.")
>>
>> It is an apology, not a confident statement.
>>
>> Basically, don't send things you haven't read yourself. :)
>>
>> thanks,
>> Rob
>>
>>

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