Your policy on making policies is crystal-clear:
Stack Exchange, Inc. agrees that it will:
[...] Post previews for review of all new official policies in the Moderators Teams instance with the policy tag, marked with links to their public version once published, and maintain a listing of all official network-wide policies with links to them in the Help Center.
[...] Announce changes to the moderator agreement no less than sixty days before the deadline to accept the new agreement with a period of at least thirty days for discussion and review.
Where can I find these policies?
The referenced policies are currently found on Meta Stack Exchange. All official policies on MSE will be tagged with the [mod-agreement-policy] tag, which is a staff-only tag, and will have a policy lock applied.
It is possible that policies may appear in other places such as the Help Center or blog. If that happens, links will be added to this page so that they can be easily found.
When and how are new policies introduced by Stack Exchange, Inc.?
If the need for a new policy arises, it will be written and shared with the Moderator Council first. Then, it will pass through a process of feedback and possible iterations before being presented to the moderators on the Stack Moderators Team. These future policies will then be posted on MSE and receive the [mod-agreement-policy] tag to denote their status.
In the new policy you have announced here, you did not follow any of these steps. What is more, the guidance given privately and the guidance given publicly differ in important ways. In particular:
In order to help mitigate the issue, we've asked moderators to apply a very strict standard of evidence to determining whether a post is AI-authored when deciding to suspend a user. This standard of evidence excludes the use of moderators' best guesses based on users' writing styles and behavioral indicators, because we could not validate that these indicators are actually successfully identifying AI-generated posts when they are written. This standard would exclude most suspensions issued to date.
It's telling that you exclude what this "very strict standard of evidence" is. Keep in mind that not all moderators have access to Teams, and that the moderator agreement you had us all sign agrees that all official policies will be published publicly.
As such, anything posted secretly to Teams is not "policy" and I do not believe moderators have any obligation to follow the bits on the post on Teams that are not included here. If you maintain that things posted on Teams and not here are official policy, then Stack Exchange, Inc. is in direct contravention of its legal obligations as spelled out in the moderator agreement. Which it is anyway for attempting to put this policy in force immediately, without the promised discussion and review with moderators.
Please reconsider this policy and, at a minimum, give the community some time to discuss it before putting it in force, as you are obligated to do by our agreement with Stack Exchange, Inc.
