Transparent AI Labeling

As a consultant who helps businesses apply AI to improve their workflows, I use AI tools to varying degrees depending on the job. I am comfortable using AI aggressively in some places, and I am much more reticent in others. I realize that other people have different sensibilities – and that norms are changing very quickly!

What I haven’t seen, and what I want, are quick and easy labels to bring transparency. Not knowing how something was produced can cause a lot of confusion, or worse.

With that in mind, here are labels that I apply to my consulting work product. This way, my clients can quickly grok how the words, code, designs, or images they’re looking at were created.

Labels

TAIL 0

I had no AI help whatsoever – not even a quick prompt.

• Writing that is not assisted by AI in any way; for reference, everything pre-2022 is TAIL 0.I'll leave it to you whether a Google AI summary that appears at the top of your search pushed you into TAIL 1 -- but remember, we're looking for transparency, not gotchas.
• Coding that is done without any AI tools at all -- no Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, etc.

TAIL 1

I authored the work, but I may have done some AI research or brainstorming in the background.

• Writing where you have asked AI for ideas or research, but those suggestions were not directly incorporated into your text. This is equivalent to using AI responses as a source.
• Coding where you ask AI for suggestions about approach, technology choices, etc., but you write all the code yourself.

TAIL 2

I authored the work, but AI helped with one or more of: structure, wording, copy editing, etc.

• Writing where you consulted AI for significant aspects of the document.
• Coding where you've asked an AI tool such as Claude Code to check your work for various issues, but you have authored the code yourself. (I don't think this is very common these days?)

TAIL 3

I co-authored the work with AI, with both of us making significant contributions.

TAIL 4

AI authored the work (or nearly so), with my review and editing.

TAIL 5

AI authored the work, and I used it without (substantial) review.

• Writing where you (or an automated system) prompted the AI and used the output without your review. Fully-automated email marketing falls in this category, as well as plenty of the slop that appears on LinkedIn (or a Slack near you).
• Coding where you prompted the AI and "shipped" the result without your (or other human) review. Think one-shot apps or websites, or automatically-written and sent emails.

Notes:

• Yes, these categories could apply without change to human help such as ghostwriters. And ghostwriters create problems with transparency as well -- it's just that the economics of generative AI has expanded this problem by many orders of magnitude
• A lot of work is derived or remixed from upstream sources, and the authorship of those inputs may be unclear. In those cases, maybe we should have another tag that means “This started from existing work, but my contributions are TAIL n”
• One thing I'm uncomfortable with is that TAIL 4 covers a lot of ground, and it all depends on what "my review and editing" mean. If that review is cursory, we might as well be in TAIL 5; if that review is careful, then it would be reasonable for me to stand behind the work.
• I think these labels work well for writing and code, but not for images or video. At the time of this writing, those modalities are authored and reviewed differently from text and code.
• I don't find vibe coding to be too useful a term these days, since people seem to use it in reference to coding that uses a wide range of AI assistance -- from TAIL 3 to TAIL 5.

This content is TAIL 0