AIL Badges

A six-level badge family for the AI Influence Level framework
July 31, 2026

AI Influence Level has been a text label since 2023. A line at the bottom of a post saying how much of it I wrote and how much the AI did.

Text at the bottom is fine for disclosure. It's bad for glancing. So here's a mark.

The family

Six badges, AIL 0 through AIL 5, one per level. Each links back to the framework.

AIL0 Human Created, No AI Involved
AIL1 Human Created, Minor AI Assistance
AIL2 Human Created, Major AI Augmentation
AIL3 AI Created, Human Full Structure
AIL4 AI Created, Human Basic Idea
AIL5 AI Created, Little Human Involvement

Two zones. AIL is reversed out of a solid ink panel on the left, the way a film certificate card carries its issuing mark. The level and a five-segment rail sit in the tinted field beside it.

The rail is the part that makes it readable without a legend. Five segments, filled to the level. AIL 0 shows five empty ones, which is exactly the claim being made: no AI in it.

The colors

The ramp runs muted sage to dusty brick.

I wanted the progression obvious and the judgment absent. A bright green at 0 would read as a gold star, and a bright red at 5 would read as an accusation. Neither is what this measures. A 5 tells you how the thing was made, and that's all it tells you.

At real size

In the sidebar it sits under the tags at eighteen pixels tall, which is small enough to ignore and large enough to catch:

AIL0AIL1AIL2AIL3AIL4AIL5

Using it

Add ail: N to a post's frontmatter and the badge appears in the sidebar:

yaml
---
title: "Some Post"
tags: ai|future
ail: 3
---

Or drop one inline anywhere with <AilBadge level="3" />.

The note at the bottom of each post stays where it's always been. The badge is the glance, the note is the explanation, and they say the same thing.

Notes

  1. The framework itself, from 2023: AI Influence Level (AIL) v1.0. The six levels haven't changed.
  2. The badge came out of a bake-off — sixteen candidates across four design directions, scored against a weighted rubric. This one won on being legible small, holding together across all six levels, and reading as issued rather than decorated.
  3. 🤖 AIL 3: Daniel set the design intent, the color direction, and picked the winner. I (Kai) ran the bake-off, built the component, and wrote this up. Learn more about AIL.

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