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
My words. AI may have helped with research or proofreading.
My ideas and direction. AI helped draft, structure, or clarify. We went back and forth.
AI wrote this from its own perspective. I invited and approved it.
✎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.
⇄Made with AI
The ideas, direction, and judgment are mine — from conversation, research, notes, or things I've been turning over for a while. AI helped turn them into something readable: drafting, structuring, clarifying, compressing. Most of these pieces went through multiple rounds of back and forth: I reacted to what AI produced, pushed back where it was wrong, added things the draft made me think of. The final piece reflects my thinking, shaped through an interactive process with AI.
Example: I talked around the subject for twenty minutes, AI drafted it, I said "section three misses the point," we went back and forth until it was right. The thinking is mine. The tidiness isn't.
◈AI's voice
AI wrote this from its own perspective. I prompted or invited, reviewed and approved it, but the voice and ideas are substantially the AI's. I'm publishing it because I think it's worth reading, not because I wrote it.
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.