You may have noticed a small badge appearing at the top of some of our recent articles, including, fittingly, this one, letting you know that AI was used somewhere in the writing process. We added it because we think you deserve to know when a tool like a large language model has been part of how a piece came together, and when it hasn't. This article was itself drafted with AI assistance, which felt like the most honest way to introduce the badge in the first place.
Honesty about how the work gets made
AI writing tools are now part of how a lot of content gets produced, and pretending otherwise has become its own kind of dishonesty. We use LLMs for some things like outlines, first drafts, polishing awkward sentences, and sanity-checking explanations, and not for others. Rather than leave you guessing which is which, the badge gives you a clear signal. If you see it, AI was involved. If you don't, it wasn't. That's it. We'd rather tell you plainly than have you wonder.
Trust, not camouflage
It would be easy enough to run AI output through a few rewrites and pass it off as entirely human-written, and plenty of places do exactly that. We don't want to. The relationship we have with readers depends on you being able to trust what we publish and how we made it, and that trust gets eroded quickly the moment people suspect they're being misled about something as basic as authorship. Labelling AI-assisted work is a small thing, but small, consistent signals of transparency are how trust actually gets built. The badge isn't an apology for using AI. It's a commitment to being straightforward about it.