v0.1 DRAFT — Seeking feedback before public release
Working title — Name needs community consensus. See discussions/NAMING.md
A simple, voluntary system for disclosing how AI was used in creative work—not whether it was used.
"I used AI" doesn't tell you anything.
Spell-check? Logic Drummer laying down a beat? A straight Suno prompt? Right now they all get lumped together. That ambiguity makes it impossible to give yourself credit for the work you actually did, and the specter of AI makes people doubt whether creative work is actually yours.
We need a way to be specific without being defensive.
Designed to be transparent, simple, and human readable: Four dimensions. Three qualifiers.
A: Authorship — Whose idea was it?
E: Execution — Who did the work?
R: Refinement — Who polished it?
V: Verification — Who checked it?
Each dimension can be tagged h (human), a (assisted), or m (machine).
This README: Ah-Eh-Ra-Vh
My idea. I wrote it. AI helped refine it. I verified it.
A blog post: Ah-Eh-Ra-Vh
Your concept, you wrote it, AI helped edit, you checked it.
A track: Ah-Em-Rh-Vh
Your composition, AI generated the stems, you mixed it, you verified the output.
Use as much or as little as makes sense. The disclosure is entirely up to you. Anyone choosing to "CT code" their work is operating in good faith.
We all want to be recognized for good creative work. There's a real difference between using spell-check, leveraging Logic's virtual drummer plugin, and typing a generic prompt into Suno. This system acknowledges that.
Music production has dealt with this before. No one thinks twice about loop libraries, drum machines, or virtual performers. We've developed norms around what counts as human creativity even when machines are involved.
But AI blurs those lines in new ways, and some of our assumptions are going to change. That's why we need a framework that's both specific and flexible—one that acknowledges social norms and conventions will shift over time.
This isn't about policing. It's about giving yourself credit for your ingenuity while acknowledging the tools you used to amplify it.
This initiative is not about determining if chatbots are sentient or if AI models are biased. Those are valid concerns, but separate issues. This is about the very human desire to take credit for our own ideas while being transparent about the force multipliers we applied.
- Evaluate your creative process across the four dimensions
- Tag any/each dimension with h/a/m based on how you worked
- Share the code with your work (optional but encouraged)
- That's it
This is a work in progress and needs community input.
- Feedback? Open an issue or discussion
- Want to contribute? See CONTRIBUTING.md
- Questions about naming? See discussions/NAMING.md
- Previous versions: Check the archive folder
I wanted to share something I've been working on. It's inspired by Creative Commons—an attempt to give people a transparent, nonjudgmental way to disclose how and when AI gets used creatively.
I think this is something our community needs. A judgment-free platform for self-disclosure that acknowledges both the value of human creativity and the reality of the tools we use.
If you'd like to be part of developing it, let me know.
This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
You are free to share and adapt this framework for any purpose, provided you give appropriate credit and distribute contributions under the same license.
Founded by Nathan Rosenberg / Beat Kitchen
Code: Ah-Eh-Ra-Vh
This was my idea (inspired by Creative Commons). I wrote the specifications and this README. I worked through some problems and permutations using Claude AI. The current state of the specifications and repository are verified by me.