AI Usage Scale
EN
AI Usage Scale: Level 5 — Automated. AI produced the substance and the form. No human read it before it was published. AI Usage Scale: Level 5 — Automated. AI produced the substance and the form. No human read it before it was published.

AI Usage Scale · Level 5 of 0–5

Automated

AI produced the substance and the form. No human read it before it was published.

A model produced the work and it was published without human review. This is the honest level for automated pipelines, bulk generation, and agents that publish on their own. It is the right answer for a great deal of legitimate work — and stating it is what makes that work legitimate.

Level 5 is not an accusation. An automated market report, a generated match summary, a machine-translated help page at scale: all of these are honest at Level 5 and dishonest at any other. Declaring 5 is what separates an automated system from a deception.

This is the level when

  • Scheduled or agentic publishing with no human in the loop
  • Bulk generation of pages, listings, or summaries
  • Live, on-demand generation shown to a user as it is produced
  • Machine translation published at scale without review

This is not the level when

  • Anything a person actually read before it went out — that is Level 4

Examples

  • An hourly market summary generated and posted by a script.
  • Ten thousand product pages generated overnight.
  • A chatbot's answers, shown to the user as they are generated.
  • An agent that writes and publishes to a blog on a schedule.

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 5 — Automated.

Medium — for an article footer or a meta description

Generated by AI and published without human review. Level 5 on the AI Usage Scale.

Long — for an editor's note

A model produced this work and it was published without a human reading it first. This is Level 5 on the AI Usage Scale, the honest declaration for automated systems.

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.

AI Usage Scale: Level 5 — Automated. AI produced the substance and the form. No human read it before it was published. AI Usage Scale: Level 5 — Automated. AI produced the substance and the form. No human read it before it was published.

Level 5 chip · no external font, no request

Inline SVG — recommended

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

<a href="https://usagescale.org/5" rel="ai-disclosure" title="Generated by AI and published without human review. Level 5 on the AI Usage Scale.">
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</a>

Hosted image — if you would rather link it

<a href="https://usagescale.org/5"
   rel="ai-disclosure"
   title="Generated by AI and published without human review. Level 5 on the AI Usage Scale.">
  <img src="https://usagescale.org/badge/5.svg"
       alt="AI Usage Scale: Level 5 — Automated. AI produced the substance and the form. No human read it before it was published."
       width="205" height="24">
</a>

Plain text — where images cannot go

AI Usage Scale: Level 5 (Automated) — https://usagescale.org/5

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="5">
<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="autonomous">

<!-- AI Usage Scale -->
<link rel="ai-disclosure" href="https://usagescale.org/5">

<!-- 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": 5
  }
}
</script>
Experimental ai-disclosureautonomous
IPTCtrainedAlgorithmicMedia
schema.orgaiUsageLevel: 5

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.