# 🤖 AI-authorship markers — specification, version 1.0

The convention for marking material written by generative AI in this
codebase. **This is a project policy, not a licence condition** — the
project currently ships under the plain [MPL-2.0](../LICENSE), which has no
AI-disclosure term. A purpose-drafted successor licence (provisionally
named GAIEST) that would make this a binding condition is still in
drafting/legal review; until it clears that process and the project adopts
it, this file states the convention this project holds itself to
regardless. It is versioned in anticipation of that licence eventually
naming a version. (A friendlier working-notes form of the same convention
lives in `CLAUDE.md § Who wrote this` — this file is the fuller spec that
doc points at.)

## The marker

- **🤖 marks AI-written material.** The marker is always **visible** in the
  rendered or source form — never hidden in a comment — and sits immediately
  before the heading, paragraph, or section it applies to (`# 🤖 Title`, or
  a leading `🤖 ` on a paragraph; in code, a `🤖` in the comment block that
  heads a file or section).
- **Plain-text fallback:** where the emoji cannot survive — ASCII-only
  pipelines, encodings, or tooling — the string `[AI]` in the same position
  is an equivalent marker. The canonical files themselves stay UTF-8 with
  the emoji form.
- **A marker on a heading cascades:** it covers that heading and everything
  beneath it — sub-headings, paragraphs, lists — down to the next marker of
  the same-or-higher level or a human-certified block. One 🤖 on a
  document's top heading marks the whole document.

## What the absence of a marker means

Nothing. Unmarked material is **ambiguous** — it could be human- or
AI-written. The absence of a marker is never a claim of human authorship;
only an affirmative statement is.

## Human certification

A person emoji (👨 / 👤 / 🧑 …) marks material written or vetted by a
person. In HTML or Markdown the person marker may be hidden in a comment
(`<!-- 👨 -->`) so it doesn't render; the 🤖 marker must never be hidden.

## Preserving and removing markers

- Copies and derivative work in source form **preserve** the markers they
  carry on material the markers still accurately describe.
- A marker **may be removed** where a human has substantially rewritten the
  material it marks — the marker described the old text, not the new.
- New AI-written material in a derivative work **should** be marked the same
  way; the narrower, non-negotiable part of the convention is: AI-written
  material must not be affirmatively presented as human-written.
- **Compiled or minified artifacts** need not carry markers.

## Versioning

Changes to this specification bump its version number, in anticipation of
a future GAIEST licence naming the version it binds.