It definitely is in the very same family of rudeness to the system. Like with everything anymore, we have to design every system to account for bad faith actors, because they are too abundant to ignore and will quickly inundate any good faith, mutual trust, or professional courtesy based system with their “flood the field with bullshit” approach to everything.

I think in this case, as in many others, we need to shift the burden of contribution more onto the contributor so that spurious contributions are more costly to the contributor than the system they’re contributing to. Much like with bots now disrespecting robots.txt, we have to add an element of discomfort to that violation of trust, since the violators lack any senses of community, respect, or shame to keep them acting in good faith.

A system that achieves the same goal as the Nepenthes Web project that punishes and wastes AI resources that disrespect web sites’ bot policies may be needed for software and scientific contributions to raise the bar on contributions such that it is not so easy for prompt engineers to copy and paste some LLM output and call themselves mathematicians.

Excuse me while I go take a shower after saying “prompt engineer”.