AI Authorship Disclosure
How I label the degree of AI involvement in my writing.
There's a question that matters more than "did AI help write this?" — and someone on X put it really well:
Compression vs. expansion. That's the distinction. When you use AI to compress — to take your messy thinking, your half-formed arguments, your 30-minute ramble, and distill it into something clear — you're still the author. The ideas are yours. The AI is a tool for articulation.
But when you use AI to expand — to take a one-line prompt and generate 2,000 words of content you never had — you're not writing. You're prompting. The distinction matters because readers deserve to know which they're getting.
This site is about AI collaboration, so it would be strange not to be transparent about how that collaboration works in practice. The system below isn't about quality judgments — all three tiers can produce good or bad writing. It's about honesty regarding where the ideas came from and who shaped them into words.
The Three Tiers
AI used for research or proofreading only
AI drafted or structured; I substantially rewrote
AI wrote; I reviewed and approved
✎Written by me
The words are mine. AI may have helped with research — finding sources, summarising papers, answering factual questions — or with proofreading and catching errors. But the structure, argument, and prose are human-authored.
Example: An essay where I wrote every draft, but asked Claude to check for logical gaps or suggest sources.
⇄Shaped by me
A genuine collaboration. The AI may have produced a first draft, or structured the argument, or written sections that I then substantially rewrote. The final piece reflects both minds, with me as the shaping intelligence deciding what stays, what goes, and what gets rewritten.
Example: I outlined the key points, an AI drafted the sections, I rewrote 60% of it, we iterated until it was right.
◈Curated by me
The AI wrote this. I prompted, guided, reviewed, and approved it — but the prose is substantially machine-generated. I stand behind the content (I wouldn't publish it otherwise), but the voice is the AI's.
Example: The Disposability Problem — an essay Claude wrote that articulates something I believe but couldn't have written as well.
Questions about this system? Get in touch.