Meeting minutes
GitHub issue notifications for the group
Fabien: we wanted to discuss whether to have github activity notified on the mailing list
Roy: right now, the public-webai mailing list receives a copy of any new issues and comments
… some people might feel this is too noisy
… any input on whether to change this to a weekly summary?
<dom> +1 to moving to a weekly summary
<tzviya> +1 to weekly
<Dingwei> +1
[support for moving to weekly]
Roy: I'll take care of doing
Andrei Ciortea on “Autonomous Agents on the Web”
Slideset: https://
Andreai: I'm one of the co-chairs of the Web Agents CG, a professor at Switzerland University and a researcher at Inria
… [presenting other co-chairs]
<fabien_gandon> Andrei Ciortea: https://
Andrei: gather expertise from different areas: multi-agent, semantic web, etc
<fabien_gandon> Autonomous Agent CG: https://
Andrei: goal is to inherit benefits of Web architecture, preserve beneficial properties of multi-agent systems, and be human centric
Andrei: revival of a longliving vision of agents on the Web
<fabien_gandon> W3C Web of Things (WoT): https://
<Roy_Ruoxi> https://
Dogu: are you going to focus on the standardization part for content creation for both agents and humans?
… we launched an org in that space recently
Andrei: at the moment, we're mostly surveying the area - looking at what exists, not developing new specs
Dogu: https://
<fabien_gandon> Dogu shares: https://
<Zakim> fabien_gandon, you wanted to ask for the targeted release date of the report
Fabien: in terms of the timeline for the report, when would you release a stable version of the report?
Andrei: hard to estimate - we've been slower than we hoped; we're building it as a living document with self-contained sections
… we might split the document into several reports to help
… we're working on the sections on identification
… we received a first contribution for environment interaction
… we're going to organize soon a session on accountability & policy - details will be announced to the mailing list
<Zakim> fabien_gandon, you wanted to ask about ethical aspects e.g. chapter 10 and 11
fabien_gandon: at the previous meeting, we had discussions with the Web Machine Learning WG work on the ethical principles they developed
… any discussion around ethics in the CG?
Andrei: one of the designal goal is agents alignment, which refers to the TAG work on Web user agents
… we plan to extract that into a document of its own
fabien_gandon: please feel free to share pointers to the IG who could also be a potential target to publish it more widely
Andrei: one last note: among the many other CGs working on AI Agents, our specific focus is on architectural design
<fabien_gandon> AI Agent Protocol Community Group https://
<fabien_gandon> Semantic Agent Communication Community Group https://
AI Content Disclosure on the Web
Slideset: https://
David: I'm a technologist, used to be the W3C delegate at Capital One
… this is the first presentation of this proposal to a public audience
… I joined forces with Dogu who was working on a very similar proposal
Dogu: software engineer and student, teamed up with David to launch a CG on AI content disclosure
<Zakim> janina, you wanted to ask about real-time, unreviewed ai generated text
janina: useful categorization, but I have concerns with some of that given accessibility discussions we're having
… we're seeing a lot of AI-generated alt text generated on the fly - currently easy to spot because they're not really following WCAG guideline
… there are a number of situations where you don't want these automatically generated alt text - e.g. in educational context where accuracy of the alternative is critical
<Roy_Ruoxi> relevant issue: w3c/
janina: any thought to extend this to generated on the fly with no human review?
David: I think this would fit "autonomous" level - it could be applied to a <figcaption> element
<dom> [this wouldn't work to annotate the alt attribute though]
janina: likewise an automatically generated summary would be tagged as specifically autonomous?
David: indeed
<cpn> article ai-disclosure="none" is a bit odd, suggests there's no disclosure, rather than no AI used
Max: (co-chair hat off) general outline makes sense, I hope you'll consider creating a use cases/examples document that outlines the subtle differences between ai-assisted and ai-generated
<tzviya> +1 to gendler
Max: the distinction based on who started the authoring process can get tricky, and could better informed with specific examples to set expectations
David: you're right that's probably the fuzziest part of the proposal
… is it based on who did the first draft?
<Zakim> fabien_gandon, you wanted to ask for discussions about the incentives for adoption
Max: "1st draft" can take very different shapes - e.g. if I shared very rough notes as bullet points that is then fed to an AI for a written up memo... it would be great to get the sense of the CG on these
fabien: what would be the incentives to adopt these annotations? we've seen a number of great annotation formats that never took off for lack of adoption incentives
David: some of it is about trust, some of it about regulatory compliance
… if you lie, what are the consequences? what benefits might one get from volunteering these disclosures? e.g. boost on visibility
… I can imagine several carrots, and there is an array of regulatory bodies that want to enforce some of these that could act as sticks
<AlexDawson> Clarification for speaker: Green Claims are regulated in the EU. If you do lie about use of AI and AI does have greater impact than human implementation - you can face consequences.
fabien: PICS got better adoption than P3P because of these indexing incentives indeed
PLH: have you thought about applying this to the underlying code of the page? i.e. whether the UI of the page was partially or entirely generated by an AI
David: not thought about it at all; I expect in the upcoming few years, 100% of web content will be at least partially assisted by AI
<Roy_Ruoxi> Generative UI discussion
<fabien_gandon> +1 to the question of PLH and to code and content we can add datasets
David: in general, I suspect users don't care as much about how the page code was generated vs the level of accountability and review for the content itself
… code provenance is interesting though
dogu: the CG focuses on the content at the moment
… I've thought about using comments to annotate code
<gendler> The reader may not care about underlying code-creation, but perhaps infrastructure providers/pieces would care?
[from the chat: On the question about the level of AI engagement to be disclosed, there is a proposal on AI attribution that suggests a richer set of attributions: https://
fabien: this could extend to the question of data provenance
Alex: had you thoughts about Schema which had mechanisms to mark advertisement disclosure per regulation?
… this could be re-used in the context of AI disclosure
david: the original proposal had a schema.org integration suggestion
… see dweekly/
<fabien_gandon> Vagner Santana: On the question about the level of AI engagement to be disclosed, there is a proposal on AI attribution that suggests a richer set of attributions: https://
Alex: did you consider annotating content coming from 3rd parties?
David: is this about annotating the target of the link?
Alex: situations where content is being imported
David: for links, it might be difficult to keep the annotation in sync between source and target - the browser could prefetch the info on link hovering
Alex: I'm coming at it from the sustainability perspective
pchampin: there may be a category missing: content not directly from humans nor from AI - e.g. content extracted from databases, which may be curated by humans. is this in scope?
… or data from a sensor?
David: it feels like this would be "autonomous" - because published without human review/accountability
<cpn> and now it's not an AI disclosure any more...
pac: my initial reaction was to distinguish deterministic vs generative
fabien: also plenty of room for discussion about what autonomy means for an agent
Fabien: We have opened a number of issues on the repo - please contribute thoughts and pointers
We are always looking for talks
Fabien: please get in touch if you have talks that would be interesting for the IG!
Max: next month meeting will be the first of the rotation cycle
<fabien_gandon> Thank you dom
<Roy_Ruoxi> s/@@@/https://