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The Authorship Transparency Taxonomy

Seven tags proposed by Mitchell R. Sowards to describe how much AI contributed to a piece of work — from fully human-authored to fully AI-generated — plus a provisional eighth tag, #AIAvatar.

Human authoredAI generated
  1. #AIFree
  2. #AIAid
  3. #AIEditor
  4. #AICollaborator
  5. #AIGhost
  6. #AIPrompted
  7. #AIGen
#AIAvatar
Human trained, AI composed
Provisional
#AIFree

100% human authored

100% human authored; no AI used in composition.

The human author composed every sentence. AI may have been used only for non-compositional purposes such as research, calculation, or analysis.

#AIAid

Human authored, AI polished

Human authored with minor AI compositional assistance.

The human supplied concept, knowledge, structure, and nearly all composition. AI assisted with smoothing, grammar, punctuation, and minor phrasing.

#AIEditor

Human authored, AI edited

Human authored with modest AI editing, restructuring, or added material.

The human supplied the core argument and expertise. AI performed meaningful editing, restructuring, clarification, or added transitional material — still clearly secondary to the human contribution.

#AIGhost

AI ghostwritten

AI ghostwritten — human trained, AI composed, human approved.

The human supplied the expertise, point of view, and direction. AI composed most of the actual draft. The human reviewed, corrected, and approved the result.

#AICollaborator

Human + AI co-authored

Human and AI contributions close to equal.

Concept, knowledge, structure, and composition reflect substantial contributions from both human and AI. Neither party clearly dominates the final work.

#AIPrompted

Human directed, AI composed

Human directed, but AI composed using AI knowledge.

The human supplied a prompt, topic, or brief outline. The AI supplied most of the knowledge, structure, and composition. Human editing was light or mostly approving.

#AIGen

AI generated from a seed idea

100% AI generated with only a kernel or idea provided by a human.

The human contribution is limited to a seed idea, brief request, or general premise. The AI supplied nearly all concept expansion, knowledge, structure, and composition.

#AIAvatar

Human trained, AI composed

Provisional

Provisional tag. AI composed new material drawing primarily on a substantial body of the human author's prior work, style, or expertise supplied for training.

The author supplied the AI with a substantial body of their own prior work, voice, or expertise (a training corpus, fine-tune, custom GPT, or comparable context). The AI then composed new material drawing primarily on that trained voice rather than on generic model knowledge or a fresh brain-dump. Sits qualitatively between #AIGhost and #AIPrompted and is offered as a provisional tag.