Towards a markup microformat for AI-assisted texts

I’m not necessarily a believe that all AI-assisted text or images categorically need to be labelled as such, everywhere, all the time. It can be a good idea in some cases, however. And in cases where it is desirable (putting aside the “why”) for now, what might be the ideal methods to do it?

I’ve seen a few of approaches so far, but not many:

• Don’t disclose the use of AI assistance in a text
• Disclose it at the beginning or end of a document
• Disclose it and estimate the relative ration of human-to-AI content in a given work (the so-called HI2AI number)

Each may have its appropriate use, but none of them offer any pointers as to how to visually display within a text which elements were human-generated and which were machine-generated. It doesn’t give us any specific advice or tools for marking up a document in a way that might be useful or meaningful in some manner to human (and other) readers.

Here are a couple initial ideas to differentiate within a text:

• Human-written text is in one color (or is available in), and AI generations in another
• Same thing, but with highlighting, instead of or in addition to text color

Here is the first as a mockup, using what happens natively in Verb.ai:

Black is the human generations, and green is the AI generations. Colors seem useful here because they are not too disruptive, and seem to add a sort of dimensionality to the text.

One issue here is where displays are restricted to black and white, or for use in print applications. So not relying on color is probably one constraint we should design with in mind.

Also: what about color blindness? What about the fact that different sites or services might use different color schemes?

Getting back to our list ideas:

• Use superscript characters like ᴬᴵ and ᴴ to mark transitions within a passage.

Let’s try that out with our quick example passage, but here in WordPress:

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ᴴThis is the beginning of a ᴬᴵstory. John had spent the last three years ᴴeatingᴬᴵ, sleeping, and going to work. His job was not particularly interesting or rewarding, but it paid the bills ᴴand that would do for now.

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I don’t know about you, but that seems awkward to me to read. It is less disruptive than I was expecting, but seems like it would quickly grow tiresome. Plus it would be cumbersome to manually insert and track those transitions in a long text.

We could do the same thing, but sub in emojis to indicate speaker:

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?️This is the beginning of a ?story. John had spent the last three years ?️eating?, sleeping, and going to work. His job was not particularly interesting or rewarding, but it paid the bills ?️and that would do for now.

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Also somewhat disruptive to my eyes as a reader. And it doesn’t display the para-textual subtlety, the sort of “shades of subtext” that I feel the color example at the top does.

Let’s go back to the list:

• Using different fonts to indicate speakers: it could work, but there are often applications where only one font is available.
• Which leads to: text decoration, such as underlines (and overlines), italics, or bold. Those may be possible in some cases, but often these text styles or decorations may have other senses to their use, such as for emphasis. So perhaps it would be better to colonize an unoccupied typographic space…
• In-line containers like different types of brackets {},[],(),||,/,\,’,”,`,~. This might be an option, but again there’s the possibility of collision with other semantic or semiotic uses. Let’s run again our text, and try to do / to indicate human and \ to indicate AI.

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/This is the beginning of a \story. John had spent the last three years /eating\, sleeping, and going to work. His job was not particularly interesting or rewarding, but it paid the bills /and that would do for now.

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It’s somewhat awkward, but it’s for me anyway a little less intrusive than some other experiments here. One thing that’s cool is that human-gens are under a sort of /little house\ typographically. And AI-gens are almost like they are \outdoors/.

Another variation below, where | indicates a start and stop of AI-gen text, and human text is not indicated.

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This is the beginning of a |story. John had spent the last three years |eating|, sleeping, and going to work. His job was not particularly interesting or rewarding, but it paid the bills |and that would do for now.

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I think that’s confusing cause you don’t know easily what is inside and what is outside the | since it starts and ends with same sign.

Anyway, there are certainly other possibilities and I’m sure we will see them flourish over the coming months and years as these technologies become more widespread in writing tools.

Will continue to explore others in follow-ups, time permitting.