Transparency and Disclosure.
When should you tell people AI helped? The answer is more nuanced than you think.
After this lesson you'll know
- When AI disclosure is legally required, ethically required, or optional
- How to disclose AI use without undermining your work
- The difference between "AI-generated" and "AI-assisted"
- Industry-specific disclosure norms
The Spectrum
Not all AI use requires the same level of disclosure.
There's a massive difference between "AI wrote this entire article and I clicked publish" and "I used AI to brainstorm ideas then wrote everything myself." The ethics of disclosure sit on a spectrum:
Must Disclose
- AI-generated content published as journalism or research
- AI-created images or videos of real people
- Academic work (essays, papers, code assignments)
- Legal or financial documents
- Customer-facing chatbots (people should know they're talking to AI)
Should Probably Disclose
- Blog posts or articles substantially written by AI
- Marketing copy that makes factual claims
- Reports or analyses where AI did the heavy lifting
- Creative work submitted to competitions or for credit
Disclosure Optional
- Using AI for brainstorming or ideation
- Grammar and spell-checking (AI has done this for decades)
- Internal emails or notes you wrote but AI helped polish
- Using AI as a research starting point that you verified
- Code that you wrote with AI assistance and fully reviewed
The Language
"AI-generated" vs "AI-assisted" — the distinction matters.
AI-Generated
AI created the core content with minimal human editing. The ideas, structure, and most of the language came from AI.
AI-Assisted
A human created the core content and used AI as a tool — for editing, suggestions, research, or refinement. The ideas and direction are human.
Most professional AI use falls into "AI-assisted." Using AI to help you write an email is no different from using a calculator to check math — the thinking is yours, the tool made it faster.
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