🤖 AI-authorship markers — specification, version 1.0

The convention for marking material written by generative AI in this codebase. This is a project policy, not a licence condition — the project currently ships under the plain MPL-2.0, which has no AI-disclosure term. A purpose-drafted successor licence (provisionally named GAIEST) that would make this a binding condition is still in drafting/legal review; until it clears that process and the project adopts it, this file states the convention this project holds itself to regardless. It is versioned in anticipation of that licence eventually naming a version. (A friendlier working-notes form of the same convention lives in CLAUDE.md § Who wrote this — this file is the fuller spec that doc points at.)

The marker

• 🤖 marks AI-written material. The marker is always visible in the rendered or source form — never hidden in a comment — and sits immediately before the heading, paragraph, or section it applies to (# 🤖 Title, or a leading 🤖 on a paragraph; in code, a 🤖 in the comment block that heads a file or section).
• Plain-text fallback: where the emoji cannot survive — ASCII-only pipelines, encodings, or tooling — the string [AI] in the same position is an equivalent marker. The canonical files themselves stay UTF-8 with the emoji form.
• A marker on a heading cascades: it covers that heading and everything beneath it — sub-headings, paragraphs, lists — down to the next marker of the same-or-higher level or a human-certified block. One 🤖 on a document's top heading marks the whole document.

What the absence of a marker means

Nothing. Unmarked material is ambiguous — it could be human- or AI-written. The absence of a marker is never a claim of human authorship; only an affirmative statement is.

Human certification

A person emoji (👨 / 👤 / 🧑 …) marks material written or vetted by a person. In HTML or Markdown the person marker may be hidden in a comment (<!-- 👨 -->) so it doesn't render; the 🤖 marker must never be hidden.

Preserving and removing markers

• Copies and derivative work in source form preserve the markers they carry on material the markers still accurately describe.
• A marker may be removed where a human has substantially rewritten the material it marks — the marker described the old text, not the new.
• New AI-written material in a derivative work should be marked the same way; the narrower, non-negotiable part of the convention is: AI-written material must not be affirmatively presented as human-written.
• Compiled or minified artifacts need not carry markers.

Versioning

Changes to this specification bump its version number, in anticipation of a future GAIEST licence naming the version it binds.