On 05-Jun-26 10:26, Jay Daley wrote:
On 5 Jun 2026, at 08:59, John R Levine <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, 5 Jun 2026, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
As I already said, I don't think we should drag the RSWG/RSAB into copyright
issues. We have the IETF Trust/IPMC LLC to deal with that (and impose a
disclosure requirement as part of their Legal Provisions if they decide it's
legally necessary).
Agreed, and it isn't.
For me the issue is an ethical one. It feels wrong not to disclose if
an AI wrote my homework. I think we need to put that point to the community.
If the community doesn't want such a rule, fine, but IMHO it needs to be a
wider community than the RSWG that reaches that conclusion..
We have always allowed people to use material they didn't write in
contributions and we have never required people to say where the material came
from. What's different now? If people have to disclose LLM material, do they
have to disclose other PD material they use? There has always been a
possibility that people will assume that an author wrote some chunk of a
document that he used from somwhere else.
I don’t think the "who wrote it" is the right lens for this. I suspect that
the big issue here is the likely huge increase in uncopyrightable text in our documents.
Sure we already have public domain/uncopyrighted text, but from my limited viewpoint it
seems minor and rare, whereas we can foresee a future where it is major and commonplace.
When that happens, I don’t think our rules/processes will be adequate and an evolution
will be needed to address that. To give you a concrete example, we prevent non-IETF
derivatives of IETF standards for good reasons, but if/when a standard has significant AI
output incorporated into it, even if that’s light editing, will we be able to continue
with that level of protection?
With that in mind, the key disclosure required is not if an AI wrote it, but
about the copyrightable nature of the submissions.
But that's really Trust/IPMC scope, surely? And in the end, our only defence is going to
be the RFC "brand". The law won't help.
Brian
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