No doubt *you* are able to make good documents with or without the aid of AI.With outright AI 'authorship' you immediately run into potential copyright issues-- which I think is the origin of the "generated by" prohibition, otherwise I think disclosure would be sufficient.Taking a step back: is Bitcoin's welfare maximized by permitting LLM glurge submissions in standards documents? In some cases it's benign, I readily agree, in others its harmful. But the number of good submissions that could be made would hardly be increased by LLMs (being limited by expert proposers with good ideas) but the number of potential poor submissions is increased astronomically. So I think it's pretty clearly a net harm to have text authored that way.I've never had an impression that drafting was at all a limiting step in writing BIPs, though even to the extent that it has been at times it's possible to use LLMs in a review capacity to make authorship much easier ("What's missing / unclear?") without resorting to using it to author.There is a particularly clear pattern at least with current LLM tools that users who lack the skills to have authored the work without an LLM are generally unable to recognize when the LLM is full of crap (and even sometimes when they should know better), so unfortunately they're only benign to use in the hands of those whose need is the least.And as a reviewer outside of Bitcoin I've found LLM powered proposers to be absolutely the worst to deal with. Because they're not submitting their own words and ideas, they're unable to change their thinking in response or explain sufficiently to change yours--- the interactions often degrade to them just copy and pasting their chatbot back to you. Because it's cheap to generate more text they also tend to flood you out with documents several times longer than any human author would have bothered with.I think LLMs have generally created something of an existential threat to most open collaborations: Now its so easy to get flooded out by subtly worthless material. Many projects, including, Bitcoin have long struggled with review capacity being limited and a far amount of time waste by thoughtless (or even crazy!) submissions, but now it's automated and even the most well meaning person may now make submissions that are as bad as the most deviously constructed malicious submissions could have been in the past, not even know they are doing it, and can make a dozen proposals before lunch without even breaking a sweat.--On Wed, Nov 19, 2025 at 12:06 AM David A. Harding <dave@dtrt.org> wrote:On 2025-11-04 15:10, Murch wrote:
> Summary of changes since BIP 3 was advanced to Proposed:
> [...]
> - that BIPs submissions may not be generated by AI/LLM⁵
> [...]
> ⁵ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2006
I strongly disagree with this change. If I were to begin working on a
new BIP today, I would use AI throughout the process. I'd ask it to
help me create a todo list of what should go in the BIP; I'd ask it to
create a draft based on existing BIPs, my todo list, and whatever other
work products I had (e.g. prototypes); I'd then ask it to help me refine
the document until I was satisfied.
I would, of course, review every word of the draft BIP before submitting
it for consideration and ensure that it represented the highest quality
work I was able to produce---but the ultimate work would be a mix of AI
and human writing and editing.
I think considerate use of AI would be even more valuable for people who
are less comfortable with writing technical English-language documents
than I am. For example, non-native literates, people with disabilities
that make text input difficulty, and those who recognize that they're
bad writers.
The PR forbidding AI doesn't go into any detail about its motivation,
although it references a previous discussion[1] where a low-quality BIP
PR was opened using mostly AI-generated content. I'm guessing the
motivation is that AI (by itself) generates low-quality technical
content, BIPs should be high-quality technical content, and therefore we
should ban the use of AI.
However, as mentioned in the previous discussion, the BIP process
already requires high-quality content.[2] AI-generated content can be
high-quality, especially if its creation and editing was guided by a
knowledgeable human. Banning specific tools like AI seems redundant and
penalizes people who either need those tools or who can use them
effectively.
I advocate for reverting the first hunk of BIPs repository PR 2006.
-Dave
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2005
[2] "After fleshing out the proposal further and ensuring that it is of
**high quality** and properly formatted, the authors should open a pull
request to the BIPs repository." --BIP3, emphasis added
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bitcoindev+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/3a66dbbe9a9c46566c8a9a16ccb1cc91%40dtrt.org.
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bitcoindev+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/CAAS2fgRV1aZ9xvAhBriZ%3DXdmYf5CvrvXWXsjVD07uynivW_qkg%40mail.gmail.com.