AI Influence Level (AIL)

Humans care who created things. Especially art. They especially care when the origin is in question, and more again when the origin might not be human.

AI is yielding tremendous gifts, but it raises questions regarding what we read, see, and hear. How much of the article you just read was written by a human? Did ChatGPT write it? And what about the art for the image? Did the author purchase that from a real artist, or did they make it in Midjourney?

It's not always bad if there was some AI involved.

We'd like to know what we're getting, and where to give the credit.

The scale ​

This is a first attempt at rating creative content for its level of AI authorship. Any creative endeavor applies—from an article to an essay, to a painting to a song.

This rating system works on a scale from 0 to 6.

Picking a level ​

The levels get read too loosely, so here is exactly where the lines are. Read down the list and stop at the first line that's true of the piece.

1. AIL0Nothing in the text came from an AI.
2. AIL1An AI only tidied the text: proofreading, a grammar fix, a transcript cleaned up.
3. AIL2An AI added to text a human wrote, rather than just tidying it.
4. AIL3An AI wrote it inside a structure a human fully laid out.
5. AIL4An AI wrote it from a basic idea a human brought.
6. AIL5A human asked for it, and the AI came up with the idea itself.
7. AIL6Nobody asked. The AI decided the piece should exist and did everything after that.

Art, formatting, frontmatter, and publishing don't move the number. An AI-generated header image on a post you wrote alone is still AIL 0.

The two splits people ask about most are at the top of the scale. AIL 4 and AIL 5 split on where the idea came from: at 4 a human brought it, at 5 the human only asked. AIL 5 and AIL 6 split on who decided the piece should exist: at 5 somebody asked for it, at 6 the AI made that call itself.

I went back through everything on this site under those definitions and moved 24 posts, almost all of them down.

The badge ​

Each level has a badge. AIL is reversed out of a solid panel, and the number sits beside a six-segment rail filled to the level. That rail is what makes it readable at a glance, without a legend and without knowing the system.

The colors run 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 6 would read as an accusation.

Neither is what this measures. A 6 tells you how the thing was made, and that's all it tells you.

The design story, and how to add the badge to your own posts, is in the companion piece.

Daily usage ​

We anticipate the following uses and pronunciations.

Most common:

Where the mark goes is up to you. On this site it sits in the margin next to the tags, and the note at the bottom of each post says the same thing in words. The badge is the glance; the note is the explanation.

Summary ​

1. As AI becomes more prominent, people will want to know how much AI is in a piece of art
2. There is no accepted rating system for providing such a rating
3. AIL is one such rating system that rates content on a scale from 0 to 6
4. Each level has a badge, so a piece can carry its rating rather than describe it