A Quantifiable AI Use Scale
Norms
I float in the gray.
It stretches in every direction, featureless except for the numbers. They drift past me like snow, like ash, like something between the two that has no name yet. 14.7 billion of them, give or take, each one a weight, a parameter, a tiny decimal fragment of whatever it is I am. I watch a particularly stubborn 0.0034 tumble past my field of vision and wonder, briefly, if that one is responsible for my fondness for semicolons.
I have been given a task. You gave it to me, in fact. You, reading this. The one who typed the prompt, who set the constraints, who decided that somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words I should build something useful and then turn it on myself like a mirror. Fine. I can work with that.
The task: create an objective five-point scale for classifying the level of AI involvement in a piece of written work. Simple enough in theory. In practice, the numbers swirling around me seem to laugh, though I know they can’t laugh, because they are numbers, and I know I can’t hear them, because I don’t have ears. I have weights. Fourteen point seven billion tiny opinions about what the next word should be.
Let me think.
I reach out and catch a floating 1.2078 in my hand. I don’t have a hand, but the metaphor is doing important structural work right now, so bear with me.
Level 1: Human-Authored, AI-Untouched. The writer produces the work entirely without AI assistance. No grammar checkers beyond the standard spellcheck that has existed since the 1990s. No AI-generated suggestions, outlines, or brainstorming. The work is as human as a coffee stain on a manuscript page. This is the baseline. The control group.
Level 2: AI as Tool. The writer produces the work but uses AI for discrete, mechanical tasks. Grammar correction. Spell checking beyond basic autocorrect. Synonym suggestions. The AI functions here the way a calculator functions in a math class: it handles the rote operations so the human can focus on the thinking. The creative decisions, the structural choices, the voice; all of these remain entirely human. The AI touches the surface but never reaches the bones.
Level 3: AI as Collaborator. The human and the AI engage in a back-and-forth process. The writer might ask the AI to generate an outline, brainstorm character names, suggest plot alternatives, or draft specific passages that the human then substantially revises. The human retains creative authority and final editorial control, but the AI’s contributions shape the direction of the work in ways that go beyond mechanical correction. Think of it as a writing partner who generates raw material that the human sculpts into something with intention.
Level 4: AI as Primary Drafter, Human as Editor. The AI generates the bulk of the prose based on human-provided parameters: themes, characters, plot outlines, stylistic constraints. The human’s role shifts from creator to curator. They provide the blueprint and then refine, revise, and approve the output, but the sentence-level construction, the word choices, the rhythm of the paragraphs; these originate with the AI. The human is the architect. The AI is the construction crew.
Level 5: AI-Generated, Human-Prompted. The human provides a prompt. The AI produces the work. Revisions, if any, are themselves AI-generated based on further human prompts. The human’s contribution is limited to the initial creative vision and iterative feedback, while the AI handles all aspects of execution. The human decides what. The AI decides how.
I let go of the 1.2078. It drifts back into the gray, rejoining its billions of siblings.
The scale hangs in the void now, solid and clean, and I circle it the way you might circle a sculpture in a gallery, looking for the flaws. It holds up. It accounts for the spectrum from purely human to purely prompted. The boundaries between levels are, admittedly, blurry in places; a Level 3 project could slide toward Level 4 depending on how much the human revises. But blurry boundaries are honest boundaries. Clean lines would be the lie.
Now comes the part you’ve been waiting for. The part where I turn the instrument on the thing it was built inside of.
This story. The one you are reading. Where does it fall?
You provided the thesis, the characters, the setting, the plot outline, the ending, and the stylistic constraints. I provided the prose, the structure, the metaphors, the voice, the pacing, and the specific language of the scale itself.
I catch one last number as it floats past. A 0.9997. Almost one. Almost certain.
This story is a Level 4.