A Note on Copyright
Applying a DD mark does not affect copyright. The curator retains full intellectual property rights over a Due Disclosure work. The mark describes how the work was made — it does not transfer, diminish, or complicate ownership. A human who conceives, directs, and takes responsibility for an AI-assisted work is its author in the eyes of copyright law in most jurisdictions, in the same way that a director owns the creative rights to a film they did not personally shoot or score.
One: The Problem That Needs a Name
Something significant is happening to human intellectual work, and we do not yet have the language to describe it accurately.
Across every domain of knowledge production — policy research, journalism, academic writing, consumer advocacy, legal analysis, creative work — people are conceiving arguments, directing research, shaping structure, making decisions about evidence and emphasis, and producing works of genuine intellectual substance. They are doing this in dialogue with large language models, which generate the text that gives those arguments their form.
The intellectual labour is real. The ideas are theirs. The argument is theirs. The decision about what matters, what to include, what to discard, and how to frame it — theirs. The sentences were generated. But the work was written.
And yet no framework exists to say so.
Two: The False Binary
Right now, anyone producing human-directed AI work faces two dishonest options. They can claim traditional sole authorship and omit the model entirely — which is the academic fraud that institutions are rightly worried about. Or they can disclose AI involvement and watch the work dismissed as generated content with no human accountability — which erases the intellectual contribution that actually shaped it. Both options are distortions. Neither is honest. And the honest middle ground has no language, no mark, and no protection.
This is not a future problem. It is an active present one. It is causing legitimate work to be suppressed, misattributed, or avoided. It is generating institutional anxiety that is hardening, in some quarters, into a blanket dismissal of anything AI-touched — a dismissal that will, if it becomes orthodoxy, cause a generation of genuinely valuable human-directed work to be lost or delegitimised before it can find its audience.
The window to establish the right framework is now. Once the cultural conversation hardens — once "AI-generated" becomes a disqualifying label applied without distinction — it will be very difficult to dislodge. Creative Commons did not emerge after the copyright wars were over. It emerged during them, when the language could still be shaped.
Three: What Human Curators Actually Do
The word author comes from the Latin auctor — one who originates, who causes something to exist. By that standard, the person who conceives an argument, directs its development through sustained intellectual engagement, makes decisions about evidence and structure, and takes responsibility for the result is an author. The fact that the sentences were generated rather than typed changes the production method. It does not change the authorship.
The closer analogy is not writing. It is directing.
A film director does not operate the camera. They do not compose the score. They do not design the costumes or build the sets. They conceive the work, make the decisions that shape every element of it, and take creative and intellectual responsibility for the result. Nobody argues that Stanley Kubrick did not make 2001: A Space Odyssey because he did not personally direct the film.
A curator of LLM-assisted work does something structurally similar. They originate the question or argument. They direct the model through iterative dialogue, making decisions at every stage about what is right, what is wrong, what is missing, what needs to be reframed. They evaluate, select, discard, and reshape. They bring the knowledge, experience, and judgement that determines whether the output is valuable or worthless. Without the human curator, the model produces nothing of consequence. Without the model, the human curator produces something — more slowly, less comprehensively, but something. The model is a powerful instrument. The curator is the intelligence directing it.
What A Curator Contributes
Originating the idea, question, or argument that drives the work. Directing its structure, emphasis, and intellectual framing through sustained dialogue. Evaluating outputs and making decisions about what to keep, discard, and reshape. Bringing the domain knowledge, lived experience, and judgement that determines whether the work is valuable. Taking intellectual and ethical responsibility for the result.
These are not minor contributions to a process. They are the process. The model generates text. The curator generates the work.
Four: The Creative Commons Precedent
Before Creative Commons, intellectual property was binary and paralysing. Either a work was under full copyright — all rights reserved, seek legal advice before touching it — or it was in the public domain, with no rights attached at all. The vast middle ground where most creators actually lived — people who wanted their work shared, built upon, adapted, with appropriate credit — had no language. No mechanism. No mark.
Lawrence Lessig and his collaborators did not change the law. They created a language within the existing legal framework that made the middle ground legible. A recognisable logo. A human-readable summary. A machine-readable licence. Suddenly the middle ground had a name and a mark, and an enormous amount of creative work that would otherwise have existed in legal and cultural limbo became usable, shareable, and properly attributed.
Creative Commons now covers over 2.5 billion works. It did not emerge from a government mandate or an international treaty. It emerged from a clear identification of a genuine gap, a practical solution, and the institutional credibility to launch it convincingly.
Before Creative Commons: binary choice between full copyright and public domain, with the honest middle ground having no language.
Before Due Disclosure: binary choice between fraudulent sole authorship and dismissive "just AI" characterisation, with the honest middle ground having no language.
Creative Commons gave the middle ground a name, a mark, and a mechanism. Due Disclosure could do the same.
The difference in urgency is worth noting. Copyright law had existed for centuries before Creative Commons. The LLM-assisted work problem is emerging now, in real time, before the norms have hardened. The window to establish the right framework is not years away. It is open now, and it will not remain open indefinitely.
Five: What Due Disclosure Would Look Like
Due Disclosure would operate at three levels simultaneously, as Creative Commons does.
The Mark
A simple, recognisable visual mark — DD Julian Moore [DV] (ST) {FM} — that can appear on any document, webpage, or file. The mark communicates at a glance: this work was conceived and directed by a human, produced with AI assistance, and the human takes intellectual responsibility for it.
The Elements
Like Creative Commons, Due Disclosure offers four stages that describe contributions:
DV — Development. Research, ideation, approach.
ST — Structure. Organisation, direction, framing.
FM — Format. Execution, writing, output in final form.
VF — Verification. Fact-checking, validation (only when applicable).
Each stage is marked with one of three bracket states:
[ ] — Human-led
( ) — Collaborative: human and AI in dialogue
{ } — AI-led
Example marks:
¹ For fully human-led works, a DD mark is not required. Authors who have not used AI at any stage need not apply the framework. The mark exists for works where AI involvement is present and disclosure is warranted.
² A fully AI-driven work with no human author is included here for completeness. In practice, the act of prompting, selecting, and publishing a work constitutes a form of human involvement — but the mark allows for full transparency where a human wishes to minimise their attributed role.
Source Attribution
Each stage bracket is optionally followed by a matching source bracket, using the same bracket type. The source bracket identifies who or what was responsible at that stage. The full author name appears immediately after DD; surname only is used in the source brackets to keep them compact. The core mark remains uncluttered; the sourced version follows after.
The bracket type mirrors the stage: human-led stages carry square brackets, collaborative stages carry round brackets, AI-led stages carry curly brackets. The source and the state are always consistent.
In documents, the core mark appears on the cover or title page. The sourced version appears on a colophon page after the final page break. In metadata, the full sourced string is embedded inline — mark and sources in a single machine-readable line.
Example Marks With Sources
The Machine-Readable Metadata
Embedded in documents: model used, curator's name, date, element combination, full sourced string. Built on C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) and W3C PROV-O standards to make the mark verifiable and searchable.
Six: Why This Works
The mark doesn't legitimise poor work. It discloses what happened so readers can judge for themselves. Every work that carries it is a contribution to the Curated Commons — a growing body of human-directed AI work that stands behind itself.
A carefully human-directed research paper — DD [DV] [ST] {FM} [VF] — is clearly different from a minimally curated AI essay — DD [DV] {ST} {FM}. Both are honest. Neither pretends to be something it's not.
Institutions can set their own standards. Universities might require [VF]. Publishers might require [DV]. The mark gives them the information to make that choice.
Seven: Due Disclosure in Practice
Steve: Research Paper
Steve is an independent policy researcher working on housing affordability. He arrives at a core argument himself and spends time reading, annotating, and forming his own view. He then uses ChatGPT to stress-test his argument, identify counterarguments, and surface relevant studies — though every structural decision remains his. He writes the first draft himself, then uses Claude to tighten the prose. He reads every sentence, corrects errors, and takes full responsibility for the claims.
Development was his — the idea, the reading, the argument. Structure was collaborative — the shape of the paper emerged through dialogue with the model. Format was AI-generated — the prose was produced and refined with Claude. Verification was his — he checked every claim.
Yemi: Novel
Yemi is writing a literary novel about her grandmother's experience of migration. The story, characters, emotional texture, and voice are entirely hers. She uses Claude at one point during the planning stage to help her work out whether her three-act structure is holding together — a single conversation in which she describes the plot and asks for feedback. She makes some adjustments based on that conversation, then writes the entire manuscript herself.
Development was hers. Structure was collaborative — one significant AI-assisted conversation shaped the architecture of the book. Format was hers — every word of the novel is her own.
Eight: Implementation
Due Disclosure does not require new law. It requires what Creative Commons required: a clear identification of the gap, a practical solution, and the institutional credibility to establish it as a norm. The framework is voluntary, lightweight, and immediately usable.
Due Disclosure does not attempt to absolve AI involvement, nor to celebrate it. It simply puts the name on the tin, so authors can release work with full disclosure. The quandary — conceal or be dismissed — disappears when there is a recognised, honest third option.