AI Transparency Badges

Human Authored Badge

AI transparency is a rapidly growing issue. AI transparency badges could be one way to quickly identify how artificial intelligence was used in content creation. This blog was Human Authored without any use of artificial intelligence, for example.

The US Copyright Office requires writers to disclose how artificial intelligence was used in crafting a work submitted for copyright registration. The word crafting is defined as planning, making and executing activities, all of which could involve AI. I clearly identify AI-generated and AI-assisted content on the PowerPoint slides in my “Copyright in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” presentation, for example.

A recording of a Zoom presentation was submitted with an application to register the copyright for the PowerPoint slides and and my voice narration. Another recent blog describes this disclosure process. Success! The US Copyright Office issued a Certificate of Registration on April 9, 2025.

Basis of Claim: text, photograph(s), compilation of artwork generated by artificial intelligence.

I recently joined The Authors Guild because I like and want to support an organization that has advocated on behalf of professional writers for over a century. They have also started a “Human Authored Certification” program to distinguish human creativity from materials that have been generated by artificial intelligence. They don’t offer badges to identify when a work is not exclusively human authored. That is what motivated me to create my own badges.

Copyrightability of AI-Generated and AI-Assisted Materials

These three types of content creation/generation are represented graphically in a recent blog. That illustration, depicted to the left, has been submitted for copyright registration. The application is for a two-dimensional artwork. No artificial intelligence was used in crafting the illustration. It has only Human Authorship, which is  “Copyrightable” if sufficient creativity and originality is demonstrated.

Human Authored Badge

The first badge we created indicates that the work was Human Authored: no AI was used in it’s creation. As previously stated, works that are solely human created can be registered for copyright protection if the work shows “some minimal degree of creativity” and originality. I will provide an update when I find out if the “Copyrightability” illustration shown above passes those tests.

AI-assisted Badge

The second badge indicates that the work started with content that was human authored. This content was then refined, enhanced, clarified, and otherwise modified a “de minimis” amount using artificial intelligence flatworm and applications. A de minimis amount of AI-assisted content does not have to be disclosed on an application for copyright registration or in a submission of a work on Amazon KDP.

AI-generated Badge

The third badge is for content that was AI-generated only using prompts to generated the content. A common example of this kind of use is in the production of images using the ChatGPT AI platform. The US Copyright Office has consistently ruled that content created by only using prompts, no matter how many prompts, is not claimable. In other words, it may not be registered for copyright protection. There are cases working their way through the courts challenging these rulings, but none of them have made to the US Supreme court to date.

@TheCopyrightDetective is the handle used to identify Dr. C. Daniel Miller on social media, and the name is federally registered as a trademark.

#TheCopyrightDetective