> 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.
I was asleep most of that time. I do think it would be good to take down the temperature, but I must explain that, like Robert, > I don't suspect that you have any master plan to convince anyone by this > example alone. Rather, I started to feel like you were taking a deliberately contrarian approach to the argument, rather than trying to work towards a consensus. That is at least what I understood Robert to mean by "bad faith". It turns out that even when slop is clearly marked as such, it's disgusting to swallow. That is, before your "experiment", I thought a sensible AI writing policy might be that all AI-generated text should be marked as such. Now, I think it should be stronger: the author of a post should be responsible for every word of the post, AI-generated or not. It is simply not good enough to say "AI wrote this, wdyt?" As with code, any posted text should be thoroughly researched and understood by the poster. Quoting from the excellent Zulip AI use guidelines <https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#ai-use-policy-and-guidelines>: > The answer to “Why is X an improvement?” should never be “I'm not sure. The > AI did it.” Similarly, on the flip side, the answer to "why do you think I should spend time working on/researching this review comment" should never be "I'm not sure. The AI did it." Anyway, I do think it would be good to take the temperature down a bit. Matthew did not intend to offend (nor do I in this email; I hope that is clear, Matthew). However, if it came across as rude to Chuck, Robert, Ilhan, and myself, it's probably at a minimum borderline, and it's probably worth thinking about why we are perceiving it that way. Juan. On Fri, 20 Feb 2026, at 1:35 PM, Robert Kern via NumPy-Discussion wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > https://mail.python.org/mailman3//lists/numpy-discussion.python.org > Member address: [email protected] >
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