Cafe Announcements 📣 Updated! Cafe rules and policies regarding AI and bots.

Pete Thomas · Aug 17, 2025

As you may all know, further to a customer satisfaction survey (member vote), we gave the saxbot an involuntary retirement package. It (the Saxbot) seemed like a good idea at the time but was an experiment that we deem to have failed. Our policy on AI will mostly be based on what Cafe members think though I believe there will not always be a consensus.

Basically we are aiming at a policy of transparency. All AI generated content (including images) must be declared as such, the only exception being the use of AI for language translation of posts.

In order to aid compliance with the UK Online Safety Act we use NSFW content detection via Sightengine which uses AI. Occasionally this may return false positives as it may not always distinguish the difference between art and life. Note that Sightengine has no rights over any of the content or data submitted for detection beyond the moderation service it provides. If you have any concerns feel free to ask.

Pete Thomas · 2026-04-17T10:19:00+0100

We have now clarified the rules around AI and posts that contain AI generated text.

Forums (and information websites in general) are possibly endangered by recent developments in search engines that provide AI answers as a priority over links to information sites and discussion forums. Where people used to ask a question at Google and being directed to sites that may help, they often given an immediate answer via AI (Gemini?)

This may obviously harm websites in general which rely very much on SEO and being found to answer queries. ( I'll be making another post specifically about Cafe survival).

For the above reasons we believe people who do come to the cafe do so primarily to engage with humans so we now actively discourage people from posting AI answers or generating posts using AI.

We did our experiment with the Cafe Saxbot and found that in general people were against it hence this policy.

That isn't to say we forbid all AI. It can be useful especially for our non-native English speaking members who we want to encourage so AI for post translation is fine.

Also if you want to discuss AI or LLMs in general it may obviously be appropriate to include a short quote for illustrative purposes. The newly clarified rules around this stipulate making it very clear what is AI, e.g. use the spoiler block for AI content.

What we think would be against this policy:

Answering someone's question by getting an AI response and posting it as an answer. Again, we believe people want to hear other peoples' actual experience and learned knowledge.
Posting an AI generated article.

Obviously this is all relatively new, so we may develop the policy as we go along, and also in the interest of doffing our cap towards democracy, we want to hear your views on this.