At ARC, we have been using "AI use levels" to make it easy to disclose whether and how AI was used to create a piece of content. They were designed with mathematics in mind, but they should be useful beyond that. I am sharing them in case others find them to be a useful standard.
* AI0 (no non-trivial AI use): no AI use at all, except perhaps in trivial or tangential ways, e.g. explaining background material, finding relevant literature, or rewriting prose at the level of individual phrases.
* AI1 (fully human digested and composed): AI had a non-trivial role in producing mathematical ideas, but these were entirely digested by a human, who wrote everything by hand (again except for trivial writing assistance). In particular, a human actively made all decisions about how to structure the write-up, how to define terminology, how to organize proofs, and so on.
* AI2 (fully human verified and edited): AI may have been heavily involved in producing both the mathematical ideas and the written content, but a human went through the content line by line, checked that it was correct and comprehensible, and made at least a minimal attempt to edit the content for clarity.
* AI3 (human–AI mixture): may contain unverified AI-generated content, but a human also made non-trivial contributions.
* AI4 (fully AI-generated): produced fully autonomously, except perhaps trivial edits such as re-formatting.
The distinction between AI1 and AI2 is important but somewhat subtle, so it is worth elaborating on. The key distinction is whether writing decisions were made actively or passively. A passive decision is one that was proposed by AI that a human signed off on without thinking much about alternatives. An active decision is one that either a human came up with, or an AI came up with, but a human put a reasonable amount of thought into alternatives. A piece of content is only AI1 if all writing decisions, from high-level structure to low-level notation, were made by a human activel
