On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 6:29 PM Matthew Brett <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Sorry - top posting - but:
>
> I delayed my reply because your accusation of bad faith seemed so
> obviously unreasonable, that I had imagined someone might intervene on
> my behalf, but it seems not.
>
> As I understand it, you're saying that my - rather silly - master plan
> was to post an AI-generated response that was so obviously wrong that
> it would persuade everyone that AI was bad.  And to add to my
> incompetence, I sent a link to another conversation I'd had with the
> AI, where it did better, undermining my own case.
>

No, I don't suspect that you have any master plan to convince anyone by
this example alone.

I think you're also somehow saying if I had not posted the AI response
> on the issue, but in a Gist, then everything would have been fine, and
> no bad faith need be assumed.
>

Yes. Precisely, it's the doubling and tripling down. If you had deleted the
PR response with an apology, we'd have gone back to productively critiquing
and possibly improving your technique. It's the fact that you took it live
on our project, knowing that it was Not Even Wrong, and not acknowledging
it when that action was criticized.

I don't really know where to go from there,


Deleting the PR comment with an apology would be a really good start.


> but just for the record -
> no - it was not my dark intention to undermine confidence in AI.   I
> was really doing what I said I was doing - which was to try and work
> out what a prompt would look like, that would stimulate the PR author
> (in general) to reflect on copyright.  And where I was assuming that
> anyone using AI would be aware that it was possible for the AI to
> partly or entirely wrong - and so to use it only as a starting point,
> or a view to oppose.
>

Stimulating "the PR author to reflect on copyright" is pretty different
from documenting "searches to confirm that no parts of the code are subject
to existing copyright", which is what you told us you were going to do.

If we had discussed your results ahead of time, we'd have concluded that
no, it's not doing searches that can do that confirmation. And you would
get my opinion that stimulating the PR author to reflect on copyright with
such output is not of value. It was not a good idea to go live and
experiment on a contributor ahead of that feedback.

-- 
Robert Kern
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