Definitions for Writers

You can experiment with AI and remain a member. Use the mark only on work that meets your field’s standard. Your commitment gives audiences a clear account of the human work behind it.

The Human–AI Spectrum has five levels. Written work at VH3, VH4, or VH5 qualifies for the VerifiedHuman mark. These levels describe how the writing was authored.

VH5 · Entirely Human-Written

• You author the original work without generative AI.
• Traditional tools such as word processors, spell-check, and thesauruses are fine.
• The work reflects your voice, perspective, and creative decisions.

VH4 · Human-Written, AI-Enhanced

• You supply the original writing.
• AI may support research, outlining, brainstorming, and citation formatting. It may also improve the clarity, grammar, and flow of your writing.
• Your ideas, meaning, and voice remain your own. You review the changes and take responsibility for the final work.
• Having AI generate a draft or passage from a prompt or outline is assessed under VH3.

VH3 · Human-Led, AI-Assisted

• You lead the creative process and substantially reauthor AI-generated material in your own voice.
• The final writing reflects your authorship and creative choices. Minor edits or a particular percentage of changed words are not enough.
• Use the Five-Word Principle to examine wording carried over from an AI-generated draft. It is a gut-check, not a numerical threshold.

Work below VH3 does not qualify for the VerifiedHuman mark.

AI translation is permitted with clear disclosure. Identify the translated version’s use of AI even when the original was written without generative AI.

See the complete Human–AI Spectrum ↗

You are responsible for deciding whether your work meets the standard. Consider where the writing began, how AI contributed, and whose ideas, meaning, and voice the final work expresses.

Research and outlining

You may use AI to research a subject, organize your thoughts, or suggest an outline, then write the text yourself. AI has helped with preparation. You have supplied the writing.

Editorial assistance and sentence rewriting

AI editorial assistance is permitted. Writers may use AI to improve the clarity, grammar, and flow of their own writing, provided the ideas, meaning, and voice remain the writer’s. The writer reviews the changes and takes responsibility for the final work.

Having AI generate text from a prompt or outline is assessed separately under the guidance for AI-generated material.

Translation

AI translation is permitted. A human-written work retains its VerifiedHuman qualification when translated with AI, provided the use of AI translation is clearly disclosed.

A simple disclosure is:

Human-written original. Translated with AI.

Working from an AI-generated draft

VH3 allows AI-generated source material when you substantially reauthor it in your own voice. That can involve rethinking the structure, developing the ideas, and rewriting the expression. The judgment concerns your authorship of the resulting work.

Replacing a few words, changing the tone, or making minor edits is not enough. Nor does changing a particular percentage of words establish authorship. Ask whether you have substantially reauthored the passage or whether its expression is still essentially AI’s.

Reading an AI draft and then writing your own version calls for the same judgment: who authored the resulting work?

Quoting AI-generated text

Clearly attribute AI-generated passages that you quote. Those words are presented as quotations, rather than as writing you authored. The surrounding work still needs to meet the standard.

Research assistance

Sarah is writing a 2,000-word article about climate change. She uses generative AI to summarize ten scientific papers, suggest an outline, and format citations. She checks the research against the original papers and writes every sentence herself.

This is VH4: Human-Written, AI-Enhanced. AI supported the research and preparation. Sarah supplied the writing.

An editorial revision

A writer drafts a paragraph, then asks AI to make it clearer without adding ideas. The tool changes phrasing and sentence structure. The writer reads the revision carefully and accepts it, with their ideas, meaning, and voice intact.

This is also VH4. The writer supplied the original writing and used AI for editorial assistance. Having AI generate that paragraph from a prompt or outline would instead require substantial reauthoring under VH3.

Standard

A commitment to specific creative practices.

Writer

The author of written work.

Represent

Claim, present, or share work as your own.

Written work

Words selected and arranged in a meaningful order to be read.

Team

A group of people working together.

Intellectual property

A creative work to which one has legal rights, such as copyright or trademark.

Essential

Fundamental to what something is.

Essentially authored

Written through human authorship, with the permitted forms of AI assistance described in this standard. AI-generated source material must be substantially reauthored in the writer’s own voice.

Essential written elements

Words.

Human

A person, or something originating from a person.

Generative AI

AI systems that generate text, images, audio, code, or video in response to prompts.

Machine learning

Methods that learn patterns from data to make predictions or generate content.

Other generative processes

Other AI or machine-learning processes that create new content.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

A field of computing concerned with systems that perform tasks such as learning, reasoning, and generating content.

AI language model / large language model (LLM)

An AI model trained on large amounts of text to generate language.

Word

A distinct, meaningful element of speech or writing.

AI editorial assistance

AI help with the clarity, grammar, or flow of human-written text, while the writer’s ideas, meaning, and voice remain intact. The writer reviews the changes and takes responsibility for the final work.

AI translation

Rendering a human-written original in another language with AI. The original retains its qualification when the use of AI translation is clearly disclosed.

Substantial reauthoring

Reauthoring AI-generated material in the writer’s own voice, so the result reflects their authorship. It is assessed through the resulting writing, not a percentage of changed words.