EA Forum LLM-use policy
This policy does not apply to anything posted before this post’s time of publication. This is version 2 of our LLM policy, updated July 3, 2026.
New policy:
You no longer need to manually disclose your AI use.
Instead, all posts will be scanned and labelled with the level of AI writing they contain. You are still welcome to describe how you used AI in your post, at the top or elsewhere, but it is no longer a requirement.
We won’t label comments or quick takes, but we’d appreciate it if you disclose when you use AI to write them.
We are (and have been) moving more low quality or off-topic writing off of the Frontpage[1]. Fully AI written text is (at time of writing) overwhelmingly likely to be one of these.
Why this update?
Since we began the manual disclosure policy, we have seen over-disclosure — users who didn’t use AI, or used it in research writing unnecessary disclosures — and lots of subtle under-disclosure (low effort AI generated posts beginning with a disclosure claiming that the author substantially edited and endorses the post).
During this period, mods have been using an internal Pangram scan to adjudicate whether disclosure is necessary, and it has been remarkably accurate.
As such, we’re going to try out automatically labelling posts based on their Pangram score. So that we don’t have to rely on Pangram being or remaining completely accurate, we will be assigning labels based on score bands rather than precise scores. Specifically, the categories are:
No label,
‘Partly AI-written’,
‘Mostly AI-written’,
‘~Entirely AI Written’.
We’ve currently set the boundaries such that I’d expect some underreporting (i.e. some posts which include a small amount of AI writing will not be labelled). We can adjust this if it isn’t working.
If you want to check on how your post will be labelled while drafting, click ‘save as draft’ while editing a post, wait a few seconds, and Pangram will run automatically.
As always, give us feedback in the comments or in dms!
How to dispute
If your post is labelled as AI-written and you disagree, you may want to dispute the categorisation. The best way to do so is to contact the moderation team on forum-moderation [at] effectivealtruism [dot] org, or to report your own post (click ‘Report’ in the three dot menu on the post page, with an explanation).
Everything below is ~identical to version 1 of this policy.
General reasoning
This policy represents a decision not to go for an authoritarian or a laissez-faire option to LLM-generated text.
The authoritarian option would be to ban LLM-generated text. To find a good text detector and to remove from the Frontpage all posts which contain generated text.
A laissez-faire option would be to allow LLM-generated text and hope that the forces of karma, upvotes, and downvotes would take care of the low-quality content that would likely result.
Both options are flawed. Taking the authoritarian route, and banning all LLM text is flawed because some writers find LLMs very helpful for getting their ideas across, and some readers don’t mind reading LLM-generated text[2].
The laissez-faire option is flawed because LLM-generated writing is increasingly difficult to detect. There are posts (I’ve seen a lot of these) which have the form of a good quality post which is worth reading, but on closer analysis turn out not to contain any ideas, or just to contain a couple of bullet points’ worth of ideas, surrounded by a lot of fluff and repetition. This leads to quite a large waste of time for the reader.
We’re opting for what I’d call the ‘liberal’ option. We’ll discourage LLM generated content by lowering the visibility of low quality posts and enforcing disclosure of LLM use, but we’ll ultimately be leaving the decision of whether to read LLM-generated content down to the Forum audience[3].
LessWrong is doing something reasonably similar, but with some caveats. Under their new policy, AI-written text must be published within labelled sections in a post. Our policy is therefore a chunk less onerous. I see our policies a little like this[4]:
We’re trying to have the best of both worlds, and I hope that we can. However, if it turns out that increasing amounts of content on the Forum is low-effort AI slop, or if valued authors find the Forum increasingly less valuable because of AI generated content, we are prepared to change our policy[5].
Good and bad uses of LLMs
Note that this section goes slightly beyond our policy, and into what we’d like to promote/discourage. Treat these as strong recommendations, rather than laws.
Examples of recommended use of LLMs
A user uses an LLM to track down statistics on laws about gestation crates by country. They check the sources provided by the LLM, conclude that the statistics are accurate, and reference them in their post.
A user sends a draft of a forum post to an LLM asking it for feedback. They make edits to their post in response to its feedback.
A user who speaks English non-natively sends a draft of a forum post to an LLM asking it to correct any grammatical issues, and corrects the grammatical issues it raised.
Alternatively, they allow the LLM to redraft their post, but include a note at the top of their post explaining that they have done so.
A user creates a post discussing evaluation awareness in LLMs, in which they include several quotes from LLMs that appear to indicate evaluation awareness.
A user has an idea for a forum post, then co-writes it with an LLM, turning a verbal mind-dump into bullet points, into an essay, into bullets again, etc… It turns out good.
Examples of discouraged use of LLMs
A user wants to grow their reputation on the forum, so they feed popular forum posts into an LLM and ask it to write a thoughtful reply. This would lead to a ban under our existing rules against spam.
A user sends a list of bullet points to an LLM, asks the LLM to write a post based on their outline, and posts the content to the EA forum without making any edits. The post is bad. This post would be moved to personal blog.
A user uses an LLM to track down statistics on laws about gestation crates by country, but makes no effort to verify whether the information provided by the LLM is accurate.
As always, if you have any questions about our forum norms, feel free to contact the moderation team. Also, you are very welcome to share feedback on this policy below. I’m open to changing the policy if you change my mind.
PS—Thanks to the entire moderation and facilitation team for multiple rounds of feedback and discussion about this policy, and especially to @Francis for writing the first draft. Thanks to @Sarah Cheng 🔸, @Agnes Hasselblad 🔸, and @Ollie Etherington for takes on the second draft, and to Ollie in particular for building the automated feature.
- ^
When a new user writes their first comment or post, it is reviewed by the mods. At this point we decide whether to allow the post on the Frontpage (the majority of non-spam posts go here), to put it on personal blog (a minority go here), or to ban the user (this is mostly used for clear spam).
Over the past year, we’ve also been moving low-quality and off-topic posts to personal blog more often, so that Forum users don’t have to spend time reading them. LLM-generated posts are more likely than human-written ones to be moved to personal blog, due to their lower quality.
- ^
I was personally surprised by how many people had this view on Nick Laing’s poll. Though a fellow mod points out that the poll was interpreted by some as a hypothetical ‘if AI could write as well as humans…’ and others were thinking of current models.
- ^
We are considering adding an option so that users can filter out AI-assisted content if they prefer.
- ^
NB- I edited this section after a message from Habryka. He pointed out that our policies were a little closer than I’d thought.
- ^
And indeed we now have, once, on July 3rd, 2026.
Disclosure is a reasonable idea, but mandating it at the top is awful, because the first line of a essay generally should be a hook, or convey the most information about the essay (after the title, anyways; especially because EA Forum doesn’t have a subtitle the way eg Substack does).
I would recommend allowing the author to put the disclosure anywhere in their essay. After the intro section might be a more natural place, or at the bottom similar to acknowledgements.
I disagree—disclosure is for the benefit of the reader, not the author[1]. If the reader had to read half a post, or even an entire post, before they were told they were reading LLM-generated text, they might be wasting quite a lot of time and attention.
We’ll see how this shakes out in practice though. If it proves too costly for authors of good quality posts which are LLM-assisted, we can always reconsider.
Though we don’t want disclosure to be too onerous, which is why it is currently just text rather than the callout boxes LessWrong is using.
I agree disclosure is for the benefit of the reader—I’m saying that, as a reader, I disprefer having to skip through a sentence at the top of many new posts disclaming that they used LLMs for copy editing and feedback.
I think the main thing I care about is “were large sections of this written directly by LLM” which I would prefer as first sentence so I know when to not read (which is actually the policy as written here, though I only realized that as of writing this comment). But—it appears that the default warning box has started scaring people into disclosing all forms of LLM usage at the top of essays, which I argue is a bad norm.
I wonder if the disclosures could be non-text by default—e.g. colour-coded with an optional footnote for details.
The thing I’m not liking as a reader is having words to process on this stuff at the start (for me this isn’t just cases where people aren’t following policy; I’ve felt it some about a case where the words were one of the suggested wordings from the policy). Non-text ways to signal could potentially get best-of-both-worlds in terms of reader attention.
Hmm yes—would it also work if it was a coloured callout you could get used to and ignore? I explicitly want newer users to know what the disclosures mean—i.e. a colour code without any text would be too esoteric.
Yeah I think that would be an improvement over the current behaviour. I’d still probably prefer something very short (“LLM usage: zero/minimal/moderate/major”) which can be expanded if people want more texture.
From what I can see, the main issue here who writes the words, about how much LLMs are used in the process.
If most of the brainstorming, research and structuring was done by the LLM but you wrote the words yourself, from my perspective that wouldn’t require any caveat at all. But if LLM’s wrote half of the words than I would definitely want to know at the top of the post (and personally I probably wouldn’t read it).
That’s why it’s so important that we get clear labelling. On this forum we should be able to choose whether or not to read something not written by a human. I would hope that only a minority of posts will have heavy LLM writing, so most posts won’t need any disclosure at all.
I completely agree with @Austin that people shouldn’t write anything if they use LLMs for feedback and copy editing—like he said they shouldn’t have to under this policy. I have seen people stating doing that, but hopefully it will settle down when they realise it isn’t necessary.
I don’t understand why you put such a significance on the drafting of the material. Someone could have more problematic use of AI if they simply deferred to erroneous AI research findings and made a post in his/her own words. Someone could brainstorm and follow the erroneous reasoning of an AI and do so in human words. Conversely, AI could draft words where the research and reasoning is checked and the words to express the thoughts are iterated many times between human/AI to come to a very strong and clear method of expressing it.
Your drawing the line at drafting both does not capture many bad uses of AI and also captures many good or great uses of AI, in my view.
I think your perspective is reasonable here, it’s just not what’s important to me. Genuine unfiltered human interaction is important to me. Knowing that I’m talking with someone without an AI in between is important to me. If that’s not important to you that’s fine. This is important to me not only because I value true direct human interaction, but also (as a secondary problem) because I think AI writing is samey and boring. Maintaining a public writing space with true diversity, quirkiness and strong voices is part of what drives engagement and excitement.
When I see your name on something, I want it to be 100% your voice and your words like we are talking in a public space. Or at the very least I want you to tell me if it’s not. If you’re not concerned with that, then we have a fundamental almost axiomatic difference about what matters in a forum like this. I think that’s part of the reason why there’s a bit of a chasm between our views, and those who are happy with AI writing things. The quality of ideas and reasoning is only half of what matters for me. The other half is the discussion and interaction between us—the mingling of our minds. I’m not sure we can resolve this difference. If you genuinely don’t mind who’s “brain” words came from, and think that other’s don’t have the right to know that as well, that’s reasonable but we may have fundamentally different beliefs.
A human or an AI could do good or bad research, I’m less concerned with that. Karma will sort that out. Karma can’t answer the human interaction question above. We can discern from outside whether an argument is good or not. We can’t discern from outside whose words they are—that’s why we need the start-of-post disclosure at the very least (I would go further). An analogy might be if someone did a bunch of research for you and sent it to you, and then you used half of their words in your post. Ignoring the plagiarism element, that wouldn’t be you talking with me it would be someone else which would be dishonest—unless you said “hey this article is half my research assistant’s words and half mine).
I think as a human I have the right to know who I’m interacting with.
We updated the policy in a way that you guys might both like :) We’re using Pangram to assign a label, and there is no longer any need for manual disclosure.
Thanks both for your thoughts! (This won’t be exactly what either of you had in mind, but I’m sure your feedback fed into it).
Yep, that’s different. I’ve only seen one example of this so far, but if it continues it’s probably just a design issue we can tweak (i.e. maybe the copy isn’t clear enough on the post-page).
[requires disclosure] A user has an idea for a forum post, then co-writes it with an LLM, turning a verbal mind-dump into bullet points, into an essay, into bullets again, etc… It turns out good.
I think this category, back and forth idea and drafting iteration between human and AI(s), has an enormous amount of value. The chatbots are very good at both generalizing from pithy insights and organizing material pretty effectively. Discussion and feedback over several rounds, at least for me, can produce content that well conveys my ideas much more quickly than if I were to just do it myself.
I think it is unfortunate that most of the discussion seems to be about demonizing the use of all AI for writing-generation, rather than distinguishing the good for the bad, and encouraging its positive use to enable contributions that otherwise just would not have happened.
Exactly. I care that the ideas in the post are good. Who does the actual “typing” is irrelevant for me.
And ghostwriting is nothing new. It’s somewhat common practice for busy top researchers to verbally discuss topics with more junior researchers who still have a good grasp on what they’re talking about and then for the junior researchers to write there verbal discussions down in the form of an easily digestable article.
Perhaps there are reasons why ghostwriting should be disclosed or not, but I don’t see why ghostwriting by an AI is a special case that deserves more attention than human ghostwriting.
I’m yet to see a brilliant article which I think is written in this manner. (I might have missed it), and I think we should be aiming high here on the forum. I also think that stylistically, if everyone starts co-writing with AI, posts will become boring and start sounding samey. I agree this method could enable contributions that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, but I’m happy to sacrifice OK/Good contributions to maintain human voice, and what I perceive at least to be higher overall quality of writing.
That’s actually a fantastic challenge: What post that gets above e.g. 200 karma has had the most AI usage? I mean if AI-heavy workflows can generate excellent content, that’s a win, no? More along the line of AI for epistemics things some EAs are working on, and might even help if AIs can help with sharing information on AI safety—at some point AI safety might need to become mostly automated to keep up with AI progress. In addition to the limit, I would be super excited to have some competitions on using AI heavily to write the best content, do the best research, and share lessons on how to use it to do even more good.
I think that’s a good starting point and I’d encourage people to share if there are good examples. It’s not necessarily a win though even if they can generate high quality argument. I don’t like the sameyness of LLM writing, I much prefer huam thought from the brainsto the page.
I’ve got no problem with AI safety work becoming automated if need be, it’s just the writing for human consumption that I don’t like right now. I suspect I’ll change my mind at some point when LLM writing becomes genuinely indistinguishable from good human writing, because then what can actually be done about it even if there is an objection?
I think something like the EA forum has a decent chance of LLM writing which is OK with people because here substance rules over style, although style is still valued.
Hmm, I’ve used LLMs to varying degrees in writing articles. Usually not to the point of writing significant amounts of text, but a case where I think it clearly helped to improve the output is this story: https://strangecities.substack.com/p/some-days-soon
Functionally, I wrote a complete draft, then got Claude to redraft, then I went through and stitched the best bits of the two drafts together (or wrote new versions where that seemed best). (If you thought the original draft was better I’d be interested to hear that: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1icY2wpcgvKszfzHFButKcOwV8B9xMypTAk48kjnOGz0/edit?usp=drivesdk )
(I notice that I’m more likely to find LLMs helpful in drafting things when writing fiction. I think it’s least likely to help when it’s important to convey my precise epistemic status towards the things I’m saying.)
“Usually not to the point of writing significant amounts of text”
This is the key point for me. Using AI for research, brainstorming and even to some degree structure makes perfect sense to me. It’s the actual final writing itself that’s the topic of this post and conversation.
‘higher overall qualirt of writing’ lol Nick was that on purpose.
nope lol. That was just bad spelling to show lack of LLMs.
I genuinely think comments should have the lowest bar of writing imaginable lol. Just get your thoughts out there and move the discussion somewhere!
I agree a lot of the time but there are also some absolute banger comments on the Forum that I’m glad people sweated over. And there is a difference between thinking seriously and being loose about form and just being loose all around.
100% comments can be any level—the best ones of course are far better than most posts. I’ve sweated over a handul myself ;).
Hang on, the category/example you cite is listed in the ‘Recommended use of LLMs’ section. So, I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with?
Indeed, almost half the post is about distinguishing good from bad uses of LLMs, thus I’m struggling to make sense of your last paragraph. Are you referring to discussion (which demonizes all AI use for writing) that has happened elsewhere?
Requiring disclosures to be at the top of the post (rather than e.g. allowing them to be at the bottom) does feel like it’s sending some implicit “this is kind of bad so people need to be warned about it” message, even if it’s in a “recommended uses” section.
Like I think people might reasonably worry about others pre-judging posts with this disclaimer, and hence (perhaps, sometimes) prefer workflows where they don’t need to include the disclaimer, even if this makes their posts worse.
I don’t think there’s an easy answer here—like, presumably the point of the policy is to allow this kind of pre-judging and let people make differently-informed choices about what they engage with. But I think the post kind of papers over this tension.
I can clarify that in writing this policy that was definitely part of my reasoning (i.e. to make it slightly costlier to use AI for final drafting).
I do think that “even if this makes their posts worse” is going to be fairly rare.
Though, as AI gets better at writing, we might all come to look on disclaimers differently. At some point readers may even prefer to know an AI has already checked over a post before they bother to read it.
I think there are very few justifications for consumers not knowing what they are buying. We should know as much as possible. When we eat food all the ingredients should be there on the packet. If some people think AI written posts are likely to be better, than people might even be more likely to read them? We should have the right to read or not read heavily AI written posts.
Labelling from my perspective is not about it being “good” or “bad” persay, but helping people make informed decisions.
Ok so I can kind of tune into what you’re saying here, but I also feel kind of uneasy about it. I guess I’d be curious what you make of the following potential arguments:
Ingredients are important because we can’t directly discern what’s in food. But with writing we can see exactly what’s there and judge that directly without needing to judge the process. (This perspective would endorse reviews being posted warning people not to read low-quality stuff.)
Requiring disclosure is an inappropriate form of thought policing—people should have the right to use whatever cognitive processes and augmentation methods they like, and take responsibility for the words they then share. If this produces LLM garbage it’s not on them to label that up front, but this should have the natural consequence that people stop listening to them.
Hi Nick. This comment is empty.
I’m not disagreeing with this post (or, in any event, not in the comment to which you replied). I am noting that most of the discussion that I have seen has been pretty against AI-generated writing writ large, conflating the good use of it with the bad use. I am noting my opinion that there is a lot of value in this usage. When I am saying “most of the discussion”, I am not talking about this post specifically, but the broader discussion there has been about the use of AI to generate writings.
LLM disclosure in general is just a good idea to do. The internet is absolutely flooded with LLM-written spam at the moment, so if people detect LLM writing with no context it’s natural to assume your post is spam as well. This is a shame when someone who is a non-native speaker has just used it for translation or whatnot.
Personally I’d recommend against using LLM-written text if you can help it, as in the age of spam the value of cultivating your own stylistic voice is increasing.
I would add that whilst I understand non-native speakers wanting to use LLMs to write more idiomatic English, I would rather read their own thoughts with a few grammar errors and unusual word choices than their own thoughts mixed up with vaguely similar ideas that aren’t theirs and pithy summaries that are actually expressing something different...
Seems like a good compromise. The examples at the end are also helpful.
About this, however:
While this is true, and indeed happens a lot everywhere nowadays, let’s not forget about the option for actual malice—manipulation by posts that look good or convincing but are actually written to persuade you to serve someone’s interests. Which can be done by anyone ranging from individuals, to companies, to industry lobbies to state governments.
Allowing LLM-generated content not only leaves the door open to heaps of slop, but also allows all of this. So some sort of defence is definitely warranted.
Thanks this is helpful. I weakly disagree with this approach and would prefer something more like the LessWrong policy, but your reasoning makes sense to me. We don’t seem to have a big problem with AI slop at the moment, and that might be because of the good job that the mods are doing in cleaning it up before it sullies our brains. The Karma system is protective as well.
”However, if it turns out that increasing amounts of content on the Forum is low-effort AI slop, or if valued authors find the Forum increasingly less valuable because of AI generated content, we are prepared to change our policy.”
That’s great to hear! Linkedin was a decent platform 2 years ago and now its almost not worth being on due to AI generated trash. Posts sound mechanical, samey and you almost feel the lack of humanity there. There’s nothing written terrible, and nothing brilliant there any more. Among African authors it’s the worst, most very capable African writers now resort to AI for writing which makes me super sad.
I’m concerned that substack might go the same way, but it seems to be mostly free of that rubbish for now at least! Apart from in the comments sections…
Thanks Nick, I appreciate this take. I’m personally hoping that mandatory disclosure will serve to discourage AI-writing where it isn’t necessary, but we will see. Let me know if you’re seeing signs of the policy being insufficient.
PS- I agree with substack, but that’s partially just a good algorithm. If you look at the best-sellers … it’s not so good.
Has anyone done any thinking about posting the actual conversations for LLM ideation and other things? I’d be kind of interested. Most authors don’t include the revision history of their papers when they publish them, but I feel like this could be helpful. Especially thinking about the case with the non-native English speaker using an LLM to translate their thoughts. I think that actually for us English primary-language speakers, funnily enough, it might be helpful to be able to see the full history.
I assume this is going forward and there’s no requirement to backlabel?
Yep, should have made that clearer. I’ll edit.
Does this apply to things like job listings (e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tS23nkt27cDRFDrMf/hiring-head-of-community-engagement-us-giving-what-we-can ) ?
Yeah, thanks Lorenzo. I’ve messaged the author.
Hi Toby and Francis. Thanks for the update.
I have never used text generated by LLMs in my posts. However, I do not think authors should be required to disclose this. I would just let the visibility of posts be guided by their karma.
This is not good or bad in itself?
The posts described above can be skimmed quickly, and then not voted on, or downvoted, thus not wasting much of readers’ time, and not gaining visibility?
@Vasco Grilo🔸 have a look at my latest reply to @Ben_West🔸 below. I think there is a worldview where it’s important and “good” to know who wrote the words, and who we are interacting with. I think we might even start to see legislation and guidelines which demand disclosure of who wrote what. Before AI, it was just assumed that all our words were our own. There are exceptions in human norms to this like having a “ghost writer” but I think that’s ethically wrong too.
Putting aside whether it’s “good” or “bad” for something to be written by an AI, and putting aside the question of quality, at the very least given it’s hard to detect if a human writes it or not, I think as a human readers should have the right to know who they are interacting with. Is it a human? Is it an AI? Is it a mix of both and how did they mix?
Hi Nick.
For me what matters more is that people who publish posts could be held accountable for their content, regardless of how much of this written by LLMs. So I agree with keeping anonymous bots out. I even wonder whether it would be better to ban all anonymous users (after giving them the opportunity to identify themselves).