How much AI use is acceptable for writing? It’s a hard question because it depends greatly on context, the reader’s expectations, and the fact that it’s difficult to usefully measure “how much”. How we address this matters for several reasons, including but not limited to: creator’s responsibility and originality, honest disclosure about research effort and sources, respecting the broad spectrum of opinion about ethical use of AI.
Consider this recent example. After writing feedback on a document I felt I should come clean that I used AI. Specifically I had Gemini “read the PDF for me” and then grilled it to find parts of particular interest. Additionally, I asked it to critique a draft I wrote (all by myself), edited the draft (all by myself) for some of the suggestions. I thought this was well within bounds, but enough use that concealment would be marginally unethical (though soon norms may change), and saying that “No AI was used” would be outright lying. On the other hand, admitting that “AI was used in creating this document” would suggest much heavier use.
How to describe this middle ground that I consider reasonable, not cheating, but also not zero either? Here I will just state that it’s very hard to think of a useful metric or even subjective scale, and of course each of us will have their own sense of the context, expectations, and norms.
Pondering how to approach transparency in AI usage I thought of Publish your threat models! (coauthored with Adam Shostack) where we posit that the benefits far outweigh the dangers. Closer inspection reveals it’s a very good fit:
- security is also notorious difficult to measure, or even define objectively
- the paper includes a section on how “Context matters”
- existing precedents are surveyed
- explains the benefits to the creator, consumer, and others
- offers guidance on preparing to publish, including redaction if needed
To be clear, no parallels between AI use and threat model are intended: only the similarity in how transparency is an effective tool for substantiating subjective aspects of a work product.
How these topics apply is very different for AI usage, but initially the approach I will suggest is also far simpler:
- share your AI session
- write a concise summary of how you used AI (e.g. “for research and draft review”)
- ideally (if this idea should ever catch on) mark this with a standard presentation (e.g. with a logo signifying “AI usage declaration” conventionally at the beginning of the document)
This allows honest creators to disclose what they did; most people will just see the summary; anyone who cares is free to look at the full details and call it out should they see a discrepancy.
When you use AI for your work - for research, for editing/review, and more - transparency is best practice (IMHO). Rarely the AI session may need minor redaction, but if you are working on a proprietary you probably wouldn’t publish the work anyway.
FAQ
- LLM writing aids(*) such as spelling and grammar suggestions can be exempted (IMHO), or meticulous creators can mention either the use or strict avoidance.
- LLM editing (I can only suggest drawing the line conservatively) should be disclosed.
- Clearly dishonest people can easily cheat, but accidentally misinforming is hard to imagine.
- Precedents do exist (this is hardly a new idea, though proposing this should be standard practice may be), for example: Notre Dame AI Transparency (and surely many more).
(*) FAQ#1 is hard to delineate and difficult to detail (listing all the typo corrections would often be laborious); furthermore, even determining whether spelling corrections are AI or dictionary based (or even drawing a meaningful line between the two) is itself challenging. Arguable minor AI use can and should be exempted in my view for clarity about use but others may have ideas for better navigating this tricky issue. For example, an “emission-free vehicle” claim reasonably excludes any share of emissions incurred by the company that designed and manufactured it (necessary for the vehicle’s existence), transporting the vehicle to the customer (shipping and trucking), and so on (including, as a matter of opinion, tire wear particulates in the atmosphere and other pollutants even in small but measurable amounts).
This approach is easy to do, requires no tools or special skills, and is far less involved and technical than other proposals to address the issue of AI usage disclosure. There is no attempt to establish any scale of degrees of usage, nor draw artificial lines along such scales. The declared usage statement is subjective, but backed by full transparency as evidence. Reasonable people may well differ in interpreting actual usage, doing so looking at the same facts. Outright misleading summaries can be discovered and called out). This method enables creators to proactively disclose AI usage in meaningful terms. If we start regularly practicing disclosure now then as AI collaboration becomes more powerful and commonplace then future tools automate including such metadata.
The question of AI use by creators (defined broadly) is important for many reasons, yet there is no widely recognized way to proactively answer it. This article proposes a simple, effective, low effort method as a starting point to fill that need. Anyone who agrees with this idea can easily start using it on their own — if you think this idea is helpful, start using it now.
AI usage writing this article: review of draft versions with follow-up discussion of criticisms