| 1 | # 🤖 AI-authorship markers — specification, version 1.0 |
| 2 | |
| 3 | The convention for marking material written by generative AI in this |
| 4 | codebase. **This is a project policy, not a licence condition** — the |
| 5 | project currently ships under the plain [MPL-2.0](../LICENSE), which has no |
| 6 | AI-disclosure term. A purpose-drafted successor licence (provisionally |
| 7 | named GAIEST) that would make this a binding condition is still in |
| 8 | drafting/legal review; until it clears that process and the project adopts |
| 9 | it, this file states the convention this project holds itself to |
| 10 | regardless. It is versioned in anticipation of that licence eventually |
| 11 | naming a version. (A friendlier working-notes form of the same convention |
| 12 | lives in `CLAUDE.md § Who wrote this` — this file is the fuller spec that |
| 13 | doc points at.) |
| 14 | |
| 15 | ## The marker |
| 16 | |
| 17 | - **🤖 marks AI-written material.** The marker is always **visible** in the |
| 18 | rendered or source form — never hidden in a comment — and sits immediately |
| 19 | before the heading, paragraph, or section it applies to (`# 🤖 Title`, or |
| 20 | a leading `🤖 ` on a paragraph; in code, a `🤖` in the comment block that |
| 21 | heads a file or section). |
| 22 | - **Plain-text fallback:** where the emoji cannot survive — ASCII-only |
| 23 | pipelines, encodings, or tooling — the string `[AI]` in the same position |
| 24 | is an equivalent marker. The canonical files themselves stay UTF-8 with |
| 25 | the emoji form. |
| 26 | - **A marker on a heading cascades:** it covers that heading and everything |
| 27 | beneath it — sub-headings, paragraphs, lists — down to the next marker of |
| 28 | the same-or-higher level or a human-certified block. One 🤖 on a |
| 29 | document's top heading marks the whole document. |
| 30 | |
| 31 | ## What the absence of a marker means |
| 32 | |
| 33 | Nothing. Unmarked material is **ambiguous** — it could be human- or |
| 34 | AI-written. The absence of a marker is never a claim of human authorship; |
| 35 | only an affirmative statement is. |
| 36 | |
| 37 | ## Human certification |
| 38 | |
| 39 | A person emoji (👨 / 👤 / 🧑 …) marks material written or vetted by a |
| 40 | person. In HTML or Markdown the person marker may be hidden in a comment |
| 41 | (`<!-- 👨 -->`) so it doesn't render; the 🤖 marker must never be hidden. |
| 42 | |
| 43 | ## Preserving and removing markers |
| 44 | |
| 45 | - Copies and derivative work in source form **preserve** the markers they |
| 46 | carry on material the markers still accurately describe. |
| 47 | - A marker **may be removed** where a human has substantially rewritten the |
| 48 | material it marks — the marker described the old text, not the new. |
| 49 | - New AI-written material in a derivative work **should** be marked the same |
| 50 | way; the narrower, non-negotiable part of the convention is: AI-written |
| 51 | material must not be affirmatively presented as human-written. |
| 52 | - **Compiled or minified artifacts** need not carry markers. |
| 53 | |
| 54 | ## Versioning |
| 55 | |
| 56 | Changes to this specification bump its version number, in anticipation of |
| 57 | a future GAIEST licence naming the version it binds. |
| 58 | |
amadan