AI Usage Scale · Level 1 of 0–5

Assisted

AI worked only on material you had already made. It invented nothing.

You made the work. AI only processed your material, or helped behind the scenes: correcting, faithfully transcribing or translating, cleaning, tagging, formatting, searching, or giving feedback. Except for a faithful transcription or translation of your material, no model-produced material appears in the published work.

This is the level when

Grammar, spelling, and style correction of sentences you wrote
Transcribing audio you recorded
Denoising, masking, or upscaling an image you shot
Tagging, formatting, summarising for your own use, or searching your own archive
Using AI to find sources, which you then read and verified yourself

This is not the level when

AI drafting a sentence, paragraph, image, or melody that survives into the work — that is Level 2 or above
AI restructuring your argument rather than your prose

Examples

An article you wrote, run through a model for grammar.
A podcast you recorded, transcribed by a model for the show notes.
A paper you wrote, checked by a model for typos before submission.
Code you wrote, with an AI assistant only renaming variables and formatting.

Say it in a sentence

Paste one of these into a byline, an article footer, a video description, a search-result description, or an email signature. No image required — a declaration that only works as a picture is a declaration half the web cannot read.

Short — for a byline or a bio

AI Usage Scale: Level 1 — Assisted.

Medium — for an article footer or a meta description

Written by the author; AI was used only for mechanical work such as correction and transcription. Level 1 on the AI Usage Scale.

Long — for an editor's note

The author made this work. AI was used only to process material the author had already produced — correcting, transcribing, or cleaning it. No sentence, image, or sound in the published work was invented by a model. This is Level 1 on the AI Usage Scale.

Put the mark on it

Copy the badge as inline SVG and it renders instantly, works offline, and sends no request to us. That last part matters: a hotlinked badge is a tracking pixel on your page, and a standard about honesty has no business shipping one. The hosted file below is there for convenience, not because we want the traffic.

Level 1 chip · no external font, no request

Inline SVG — recommended

Self-contained. Nothing to load, nothing to track.

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</a>

Hosted image — if you would rather link it

<a href="https://usagescale.org/1"
   rel="ai-disclosure"
   title="Written by the author; AI was used only for mechanical work such as correction and transcription. Level 1 on the AI Usage Scale.">
  <img src="https://usagescale.org/badge/1.svg"
       alt="AI Usage Scale: Level 1 — Assisted. AI worked only on material you had already made. It invented nothing."
       width="205" height="24">
</a>

Plain text — where images cannot go

AI Usage Scale: Level 1 (Assisted) — https://usagescale.org/1

Let machines read it too

The same declaration, in the vocabularies the compliance layer already speaks. We are not competing with these — we are the human-readable face of them.

For the <head> of your page

<!-- AI Usage Scale proposal; custom metadata, not a registered standard -->
<meta name="ai-usage" content="1">
<meta name="ai-usage-standard" content="https://usagescale.org">

<!-- Experimental syntax aligned with discussions in the W3C AI Content Disclosure Community Group; not a W3C standard -->
<meta name="ai-disclosure" content="ai-assisted">

<!-- AI Usage Scale -->
<link rel="ai-disclosure" href="https://usagescale.org/1">

<!-- schema.org -->
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "CreativeWork",
  "additionalProperty": {
    "@type": "PropertyValue",
    "propertyID": "https://usagescale.org/spec#aiUsageLevel",
    "name": "aiUsageLevel",
    "value": 1
  }
}
</script>

Experimental ai-disclosure	`ai-assisted`
IPTC	`algorithmicallyEnhanced`
schema.org	`aiUsageLevel: 1`

If the parts differ

Optional. A single number describes the work as a whole. When parts of it differ sharply, declare them. The badge always shows one number; the breakdown lives behind the link.The headline level describes the part of the work that carries its meaning. Decorative material that a reasonable audience would not consider material to the work does not drive the headline — declare it here instead.