Dear Pablo,
I agree with your response to the misuse of AI as an arsenal of
conformist answers when faced with the need to quickly produce discourse
that appears to be similar to academic assertions. But I just wanted to
raise the issue of electronic signatures “in general.” And I didn't know
how personally involved you were in debugging “poppler” so that people
who use PDF with Linux systems could have a reliable signature system.
And I didn't know (I don't know a lot of things...) how Okular seems to
be almost the only reliable way (for now) to do this kind of thing safely.
Best//JP
Le 18/12/2025 à 19:45, Pablo Rodriguez via ntg-context a écrit :
On 12/18/25 18:06, Jean-Pierre Delange via ntg-context wrote:
[...] My apologies if I have broken the unspoken rule of not citing
my sources and, as a result, if I have offended anyone.
Dear Jean-Pierre,
I think as a general rule it is an excellent idea to cite all relevant
sources (to give other people the opportunity to check if I’m missing
something [or the whole point] there).
My apologies for having reacted in such a poorly manner. If it helps to
understand, I felt something like being fed a mechanical summary in
something I had to learn by experience and some extra effort (dedicating
much free time during months) to understand what was wrong and how it
could be fixed.
That being said, I’m afraid I think it shouldn’t be a problem finding
disgusting AI-generated summaries (or texts, for that matter). I have
never asked for AI-generated summaries, but as Hans mentioned, the only
thing left for “Acrobat Reader” to display is “this text is long and you
look incredibly stupid today, let me summarize it for you”.
Since I have been exposed to that kind of “help” (AI-generated summaries
sent to me), there are two main issues I have with all AI-generated text.
Their accuracy is similar to be able to recognize a romanesque
cauliflower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli) only as
as cauliflower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauliflower). I’m afraid I
cannot avoid thinking they are way different vegetables.
The verbosity and pompousness in these texts only matches their
shallowness. In short, too much words for almost nothing at all. I also
think that this kind of textual input decreases reading comprehension
and text composition in humans.
This is why I think AI-generated text should be avoided in written
communication, or at least it should be warned about and marked as such.
We are getting there in having `poppler` as reasonable PDF signing
software, but the process is painfully slow (too much to do, very few
people to do it).
I hope it won’t take years to have relevant feature parity with
signatures in “Acrobat Reader” (which I’m not a fan of, but it is a
useful program in that regard).
Best wishes,
Pablo
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