AI Use Levels

"I used AI for this" has stopped meaning anything. The same sentence covers a chatbot that polished one paragraph and an agent that ran all night with access to production. AI Use Levels is a tag of four words in a fixed order, Level · Hand · Door · Tool, that says in one breath what one piece of work owes to generative AI: whether the tool could change anything by itself, how much of the result is its output, whether what it did can be taken back, and what the tool was. SAE rates the car. This rates the trip. A tag describes what happened on one piece of work, never what the tool could have done.

Canonical page: https://papers.4thcltr.com/ai-use-levels/. Machine-readable form: spec.json in this repository. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

1. Identity

2. Syntax

The human form is the canonical one. Fixed order, any separator people already type:

L2 · made · undo · Claude Code

Spoken: "level two, made, undo, Claude Code". As a sentence: "Claude Code made it under supervision, all under undo."

The shortest honest tag is L1 · ChatGPT. The full tag is Level · Hand · Door · Flag · Tool.

The machine form goes in a commit trailer, front matter, an HTML meta or an image sidecar. Same tokens, tool in parentheses:

AI-Use: L2 made undo (Claude Code)

Pattern: AI-Use: <level> [hand] [door] [flag] (<tool>) [v<major>].

Every token identifies itself. An L and a digit is a Level, a Hand word is a Hand, a Door word is a Door, unread is the flag, and parentheses hold the tool. A parser reads by token, not by position. The tool runs from the first opening parenthesis to the last closing one, so a reach parenthetical nests: AI-Use: L1 touched (Copilot (IDE)). A tag with no version token is version 1. A tag under a later version carries its own after the tool: v2. The trailer sits beside git's Co-Authored-By: that trailer names the tool, and this one says what it was allowed to do.

Absence. No tag means nothing claimed. It never means L0.

3. LEVEL (the headline)

The question is whether the tool could change anything by itself, and whether each change waited for a yes. A change is an effect outside the conversation: it wrote, sent, paid, deployed, deleted, published or told someone. Reading, searching and generating text are not changes.

The flag unread means no accountable person has read the result. It attaches to any level. L1 · made · unread · DeepL is a translation posted blind. L3 · made · no undo · unread is the bot that merged to production. The flag is a state, not a level: it comes off when a person reads. A level never changes after the fact.

Rules:

• One tag per piece of work. Where the steps differed, tag the highest level reached by any step that changed something. A read-only step raises nothing.
• Granularity is the person's. One yes to a plan of forty changes is L2: the person could have said no before anything happened. Four hundred yeses in two hours is still L2. The tag rates the opportunity to intervene, not the diligence. A rubber stamp is still tagged L2; the scheme cannot tell diligence from its absence.
• A person is someone accountable for the work. A model reviewing a model lowers nothing.
• A run that changed nothing outside the conversation is L1, however long it ran. A research agent that worked for twenty minutes and produced a report is L1 · made.
• The numbers do not map to SAE J3016. SAE L3 is the handover level. This L3 means only that it acted without waiting.

4. HAND (its hand in the result)

Hand says how much of the final is the machine's output. It rates production, not ideas: a transcript, a translation and a summary are all made, and the reader knows from the genre whose ideas they were. Hand is independent of Level. A person can press every button and still publish something the machine made whole. That is L1 · made, the case most often left untagged.

Rules:

• Judge the final, not the interactions. Two hundred tab-accepts that add up to most of the file are made.
• Choosing is not reworking. One picked from forty generations is made. Inpainting a hand is still made.
• In doubt between two rungs, pick the larger.
• Hand has three rungs and not one label because one word cannot carry this. Meta's single "Made with AI" label landed on retouched photos and was renamed within months.

5. DOOR (what it did that cannot be taken back)

Door is tagged only at L2 and L3, because at L1 the machine changed nothing. It rates reversibility, with reach folded in.

Rules:

• Tag the worst door opened, not the typical one. One sent email makes the whole piece no undo.
• Door rates the machine's changes, not the person's. If the AI drafted an email and a person reworked it and pressed send, the send is the person's act: L1 · drafted, no door. The irreversibility belongs to the person, and the tag says so by leaving the slot empty.

6. TOOL (free text, last)

Name the tool as specifically as you can: Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Code, Copilot (IDE), GPT-5 (API). A product name is acceptable. A model version is better, because it fixes the date. How the tool was reached goes here as an optional parenthetical: (chat), (IDE), (app), (API), (agent). Reach is a property of the tool, and its risk is already carried by Level and Door, so it earns no slot of its own.

Several tools: name the one with the biggest hand first, then the others after a plus: L2 · made · undo · Claude Code + Copilot.

7. Worked examples

Each tag follows from the tests in sections 3 to 5. (tool) stands for whichever tool it was.

The same examples are in examples/examples.json with their machine form, and a test holds the two lists equal.

8. Marks

A mark is a symbol for the Level alone, for places with no room for the full tag: a social bio, an image overlay, a chat display name, a slide footer. The circle is the work and the dot is the tool. The four marks differ only by where the dot is, so they read without colour, without letters and in any language.

1. A mark carries the Level and nothing else. Hand, Door, the flag and the Tool are in the full tag.
2. A mark refers to a full tag. Put the full tag in the mark's link, alt text or title, or beside the work. A mark with no full tag behind it claims nothing, the same as a missing tag (section 2).
3. Alt text and the SVG <title> are the label AI use level 2, Supervised, which a screen reader says as the spoken form "AI use level two, Supervised", not as a description of the shape.
4. The marks are monochrome and must stay distinct at 12 px and at 1 bit. Do not add letters, digits or colour inside the circle.
5. The files are in marks/, black on white (-light) and white on black (-dark), under CC0 so anyone can redraw or embed them. spec.json lists each mark with its name, spoken form, file names and braille.
6. Braille is Unified English Braille, uncontracted, stored as Unicode braille cells. braille spells the level token as typed in a tag: L0 ⠠⠇⠼⠚, L1 ⠠⠇⠼⠁, L2 ⠠⠇⠼⠃, L3 ⠠⠇⠼⠉ (capital letter indicator, l, numeric indicator, digit). brailleName spells the level name: None ⠠⠝⠕⠝⠑, Suggested ⠠⠎⠥⠛⠛⠑⠎⠞⠑⠙, Supervised ⠠⠎⠥⠏⠑⠗⠧⠊⠎⠑⠙, Unattended ⠠⠥⠝⠁⠞⠞⠑⠝⠙⠑⠙. A tactile label puts the token, the name or both beside the raised mark. A braille reader has not yet checked these strings; spec.json says so under marksStatus.

Examples:

The robot-face mark proposed for 1.1 (🤖2) is withdrawn. It is no shorter than L2, an emoji depends on the platform's drawing, and a screen reader reads it as "robot face".

9. Dated or versioned?

Version the scheme. Do not date a use tag. Date a standing tag.

1. The scheme is versioned: 1.0, 1.1 and so on, like CC 4.0. A tag with no version token is version 1.
2. A use tag on one piece of work is not dated. The artifact carries the date: the post, the commit, the document, the release. Tokens never change meaning (section 10), so an old tag reads correctly forever. A hand-typed tag must stay short.
3. The tool name is versioned where it can be. Claude Opus 5.5, not Claude. The model name is the date.
4. A standing tag on a system or a policy is dated. "Support bot runs at L3 · made · no undo, 2% read, since June 2026." "Production changes are L2 or lower (policy of 2026-10)." A stance gets revised, and a reader needs to know which one was in force. The standing tag is also the fleet form: ten thousand chats get one dated standing tag, not ten thousand use tags.
5. An artifact with no date of its own carries one beside the tag: a bio, an evergreen page, a screenshot that will be reposted.

The objection that the same agent suggests today and executes unattended tomorrow is answered by the principle, not by a date. The tag describes one piece of work.

10. Extension rules

1. A published token never changes meaning. A bad token is fixed by adding a new token and deprecating the old one. Nothing is redefined and nothing is renumbered.
2. Levels grow upward only. The first candidate for L4 is it chose the task. Every current level assumes a person set the goal. A proactive agent that decides what to do next is a new rung, not a flag.
3. A new slot carries its own closed vocabulary, and no word is shared between slots, so every token still identifies itself and order stays a reading convention. New slots go before the tool.
4. A minor version adds tokens, flags or slots and stays backward compatible. A major version is a last resort. Deprecate, never remove.
5. Candidates for a later minor version (1.2 or after), left out to keep the tag at four words: checked (tests, a fact-check or a second reader ran; the answer to whether the person could even read it), data (the material left your machine, or went to training), whose (my things, our things, other people's things), and duration.
6. Governance. The specification is public and forkable, with a changelog. Proposals are issues. A token is accepted when three real uses cannot be tagged honestly without it.
7. A mark (section 8) is not a token, so the three-uses test in rule 6 does not apply to it. The mark set is fixed for every 1.x version. A new mark is added only with a new level, and a published mark never changes its level.

11. Known limits

• It rates opportunity, not diligence. A rubber stamp at L2 tags the same as a real review.
• Hand is self-reported and will be shaded downward. CRediT had the same problem and spread only when publishers required it.
• It says nothing about what the tool was permitted to do. That is a governance question (the Cloud Security Alliance framework, Zheng et al.) and belongs in a dated standing tag, not a use tag.
• It does not establish liability. It does show where liability needs an owner: every L3 · no undo.

12. Route to a standard

The aim is for the four marks to be encoded in Unicode, as the Creative Commons symbols were: 🅭 and 🅯 entered Unicode 13.0 in 2020, years after the licences were in wide use. The Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) encodes a symbol when there is evidence that people other than its authors use it in running text. The order of work:

1. Publish the marks: the SVGs in this repository under CC0, then a small open font that maps them to Private Use Area code points until real ones exist.
2. Use them on the 4th Culture sites and in the README of each gorfednet repository whose commits carry the AI-Use trailer.
3. Keep a public log of third-party use with links and dates, opened as issues in this repository.
4. When the log shows use by unrelated publishers, submit a UTC proposal for four characters with the names in section 8, the spoken forms, the reference glyphs and the log as evidence.

Alongside that:

• Machine form. Register AI-Use as an HTML meta name on the WHATWG MetaExtensions list, and propose the tag as a value set to IPTC beside its digital source type, which C2PA manifests already reference.
• Commit trailer. AI-Use follows git's trailer syntax and needs no registration. Tools that read Co-Authored-By are asked to read it too.

Nothing has been submitted to any body yet. Each submission is listed here with its date when it is made.

13. Prior art

Sources read:

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14692v2
• https://leonfurze.com/2023/12/18/the-ai-assessment-scale-version-1/
• https://labs.cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/agentic-ai-autonomy-levels-control-framework-v2-csa-styled/
• https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2607.23438
• https://medium.com/@tahirbalarabe2/what-is-loop-engineering-four-levels-of-agentic-loops-ccc48b850002