AI Authorship Credit Scoring System
Whose Word Is It Anyway? Especially when assisted by AI
The most pressing question we are perhaps facing is about the originality and authenticity of a book, poem, article, and so on—about the words, basically.
Because a reader is not just reading the text; he is reading the mind that produced it.
He trusts the writer, and that trust drives him toward reading that text. Every reader is not just reading the text; he is establishing, or taking forward, a relationship with the one who produced it.
Keyboardist
Initially, I thought: why would a reader not just read the words and appreciate the text? Why this emphasis on who produced that text? After all, producing text is an art, just like playing a keyboard. Isn’t it? Everyone can have a Korg, but he who plays it better draws the crowd in. Likewise, everyone has Claude. But he who plays it better should draw the crowd, or get credit for it. But when I brought this point to Claude, Claude said something I won’t forget. He said one has to produce just a gesture to get a structured, long-form, coherent output.
A keyboardist does not press just one key and get a sonata. He plays every note himself. That is his credit.
Camera
The hunt then started for a better analogy: a camera. Autofocus camera. Image stabilization. AI camera. A user, or a photographer, just needs to click, and everything else is taken care of by the AI camera. And who gets the credit here? The photographer himself. Wow. Finally, I found an analogy to argue in favor of AI authors. But wait—Burrow-Giles. The court upheld the constitutionality of extending copyright protection to photographers. It established that a photograph qualifies as an original “writing” of an “author” if the photographer exercises intellectual creativity in its production.
Thus, photography won art status by evidencing selection and framing. It did not do so merely by asserting it, but by evidencing it. See the difference?
Alright, I said. Now we just need to do something to help AI authors get the same credit—by evidencing it. This blog has evidence in the form of a dialogue with Claude. This clearly tells you what my prompt was.
I think a prompt is not just a click, but more like posing the subject, arranging the scene, choosing the lighting, and selecting the angles. It is not just a keypress; not a sonata, certainly, but still a condition or an environment that invokes a sonata. The credit is not equal to playing a sonata worth ₹10000, but it’s certainly worth ₹10. At least it is not zero.
Cool. Finally, I thought we had something to develop. I had something to start with.
Okay, let us shift to the keyboardist example. In that case, he plays the notes. If one note goes wrong, what happens? People get embarrassed. What if a photo is bad? People get embarrassed again, but here they are affected more than they would be by bad notes; the imagery may leave a lasting impression on the mind. What if a word is wrong? Are you serious? The meaning changes. Interpretation changes. The entire chain of thought that the words trigger inside a reader’s mind changes. If it is fiction, maybe it is okay, I thought.
But what if it is a legal document? Got the drift? This calls for a risk-tiered approach, exactly as outlined in the EU AI Act. The answerability, or vouching burden, scales with each tier. The stakes scale too.
And even if it is fiction, it is still a story that a reader wants to relate to. A reader is willing to change his mind—mind you—after reading fiction. His inspiration changes. His motivation changes. His mind changes. Because a reader trusts the author before the words.
Authenticity Axis
Macpherson’s controversy is deeply revealing. He presented his own compositions as translations of an ancient Gaelic bard. Now notice carefully where the scandal lies. Content was original. It was powerful. It had an impact. The work moved people, entered their imagination, shaped taste, and influenced art. So where’s the offense here? The offense was false provenance. A fabricated source.
And that is why this example is gold for the AI age.
Fiction could therefore be low-risk on truth in one sense, but high-risk on authenticity in another. Its internal liberty does not grant external dishonesty. You may invent the tale, but you cannot casually invent the ancestry of the tale.
That outer declaration — who made it, from where it came, in what capacity it was transmitted — is exactly where public trust enters. And once that trust is disturbed, the whole authorship question ignites. That, precisely, is the axis on which the AI debate sits today. Authenticity axis.
And just see the impact of fiction! We Indians grow up reading mythology, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and so on. They have not just a long-lasting impact, but perhaps an eternal impact on our lives.
People fight for their lives. Generations fight for the installation of Rama Lalla in Ayodhya. Fictions shape beliefs. So AI is not just an instrument. It is like an agent. It has immensely greater power to intervene in your life than perhaps any note or photo. That is why evidence matters. That is why a credit system matters.
Cinema
Yes, that is agreed. It is almost an agent. Then I thought about watching a film. I never check the cinematographer. I just go to the theatre and watch a movie. I get completely immersed in the movie without even knowing its full staff. I thought: why do people not just read a book without knowing its author? Again, the same question—but now the analogy is cinema. My mind never wants to settle, it seems.
But hold on. Cinema has strong documentation of almost thousands of roles and who performed them. Those are the credits. Forget who did the cinematography; a film also mentions who provided the camera. Generally, filmmakers hire that camera provider because the camera is too expensive. But they mention even that. And by the way, why do they mention all these things? For pure reception.
Universalization
Let us dive into the Natya Shastra, particularly into something called sadharanikarana. What does that mean? It means universalization, or in ML context, generalization. Our ego generally reacts differently when it knows that someone is dead or in pain. If he is one of our near and dear ones, we react strongly; if he is someone from another country, far removed from our relations, we react differently. Because we are attached to our near and dear ones. It is the declaration of this frame that gives us the assurance that “this is all made up; there is no relevance to real incidents; you are safe; you do not need to react or fact-check.” I feel that we humans naturally act as protectors and guards. In the spirit of Abhinavagupta’s obstacles to rasa—he calls them Vighnas. If someone depicts a Ramayana and shows that Hanumana was hurt while burning Lanka, viewers would burn the theatre. Now, if they are told that this story is inspired by the Ramayana and is not the Ramayana, then reactions become much milder. That distance from reality is declared by announcing the frame, the cast, the intent, the method of shooting, that no animal was hurt, that no one under 18 was employed, and so on.
And see what that achieves: pure immersion. Viewers get fully immersed because of knowing these precise disclaimers. The credit system is in place before the film is released. Viewers know who to blame in case there’s any rasa-bhanga and who to praise otherwise.
They see a poster of a movie.
It is an assurance that says, “I’m a poster, not an impostor.” This narrative disclaimer signals that the story is crafted, a fictional world. Impostors pass off fabrication as truth. Posters are transparent about that fabrication.
Even a formal statement that all characters are fictitious protects them from tons of defamation claims or liabilities. So there is another reason: legal shield. It also makes it easier to pinpoint who did what.
So when you know someone is lost, and you know he is neither your friend nor your foe, nor your family, you shed all that prevents a pure reaction from you—attachments and aversions, raga and dvesha. And what does this bring? Pure rasa—no rasa-bhanga, nothing that violently shatters the pure aesthetic experience. Hushhh. Now I am onto something more concrete. At least the analogies should end here. Now comes the next big question: who should build this credit scoring?
Building a Credit System
In films, it is easier. Much easier. In AI, it is a nightmare. Consider the phrase “Written with AI assistance.” Too vague, isn’t it? Now consider something more nuanced: “My idea expanded and expressed by AI,” or “Idea by AI expanded and expressed by me,” or “Shared idea expressed and expanded by me,” or “Idea expressed by me and enriched by AI,” and so on. It is somewhat similar to the difference between a story and a screenplay. AI writing a story and AI writing a screenplay are vastly different. Declare that difference.
Do not stop there. Back it up with evidence in the form of a recorded dialogue between the author and the AI. As we saw before, a reader reads the author’s mind and not just his words. This dialogue with AI helps a reader understand how the author thinks. In AI governance, we ask AI to write what it thinks by asking it to log it—precisely to debug and de-vague. If we do both, the reader can clearly see how the author thinks and how the AI thinks. This is a demonstration of the declared difference. Evidence. This essay intends to do exactly that.
In the taxonomy of writing, we have quotes and citations. Even in Google AI mode or Perplexity, we see that responses are tagged to the documents, references, and websites from which they are formed or generated. Then can we do the same thing here too? Wow. Nice idea. Does it work practically? No. Citations, quotes, and references to PDFs and websites remain. They stay. The AI responses? The same prompt can produce thousands of responses under different temperature, top-p, and top-k settings.
That is why we need not just citations and dialogue, but provenance. Parampara. How did the truth flow into a book? Who touched that truth? Who transformed that truth? It is like a data engineering pipeline: from raw data to finished data, with all ELT operations in between.
Again, data engineering pipelines, citations, and references are totally reproducible. AI responses are not. We just saw that. So perhaps it is like running a lab experiment—a lab notebook. Its core purpose? Reproducibility. Legal proof for establishing IP. Data integrity. Accountability. Project continuity. While this is the best approximation so far for AI writer credit scoring, it seems necessary but not sufficient.
Okay. Let us set this lab notebook as the benchmark.
An Honest Step At A Time
What do we need to do to get there? “Written with AI assistance” is the first honest step, valid only until we find a better one—or, in other words, valid before we find a better one, and abused or misused after we find a better one. Honest before. Dishonest after.
It is an evolution, and I am very excited to be a witness—hmm, not just a witness, but an active participant. As long as we are making progress in this scoring system, we need to comply with the latest demands and use the latest credits or terminologies from this credit system, and stay relaxed as authors. This relaxation is not a default state.
Relaxation is earned by making the ledger clean.
We stay relaxed when we pay our debt completely to a bank. So, an author should pay his debt by declaring the scoring system himself. No one would come and do this work for the author.
Uddhared Ātmanā Ātmānam! As more and more authors become transparent this way, it sets a standard. This standard then becomes demand. This demand brings the law. Continuing the bank example, even if we pay the debt, we remain indebted forever to that bank who helped us when we needed the money.
This indebtedness, or willingness to remain indebted, is a prerequisite on the author’s side. Indebted forever to answer any queries on my text. This will help us progress and evolve not only the scoring system, but also the writer within us, making that writer better and better over time.
Let us stop here until we reach this stage in practice. I will write more on this after that. Until then, here is my credit scoring for this article:
Frame built in dialogue with Claude Fable 5.
Every word written by me.
Conversation logged and attached here.
Clarification received from Gemini 3.1 Pro.
Final audit done with Claude Fable 5.
Written by Amod. Inspired by Claude. Informed by Gemini. Audited by Claude. Logs attached.
Possession released. Ownership retained. I am responsible and answerable for every word in this article.
See you next time.
CREDITS:
I. Article Provenance:
Frame: Built in dialogue with Claude Fable 5
Drafting: Every word written by Amod
Audit: Final verification by Claude Fable 5
Transparency: Conversation logs attached below
II. Sources and Citations:
https://www.mhinnovation.net/sites/default/files/content/document/Sadharanikaran%20March%202015.pdf
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/artificial-intelligence/graph-based-semi-supervised-learning/
III. Dialogue with AI:
CLAUDE Interaction:
If we hate a text produced by AI, if we are worried about who vouches for that text more than what the text contains, I feel we can consider LLM as just another instrument like a synthesizer or keyboard. It can play natural sounds produced by harmonium, flute, etc. Experts can easily identify the difference but sometimes it matters and most of the time it doesn’t. We can think authors that use AI to write as keyboardists or pianists. They play beautifully. Audience come to hear how they play. Same thing applies here. Writers play AI. Everyone has Claude. But who plays it better? That question matters as good as who owns the words. Contexts might differ.
The analogy earns its keep in one place and breaks in two, and by your own standard — mechanism-grounded correspondence, not vibes — the breaks matter.
Where it holds: performance skill is real, and “everyone has Claude, but who plays it better” is a genuine question. Where it breaks first: with a synthesizer, every note passes through the player’s body in real time. Continuous motor control, one gesture per sound. With an LLM the ratio inverts — one discrete gesture upstream, and the output contains structure the player never specified. A keyboardist cannot press one key and receive a sonata. So “playing” flatters the prompter with a granularity of control the mechanism doesn’t deliver. The closer instrument isn’t the synthesizer; it’s the camera. The device does the rendering, the artist contributes selection, framing, timing — and photography was admitted as art on exactly that ground, in court, in Burrow-Giles. That’s the honest version of your claim, and it’s a more modest one.
The second break is your own: notes don’t assert. Nobody asks who vouches for a C-sharp because a C-sharp makes no claim about the world. Sentences do. A wrong note embarrasses the player; a wrong sentence deceives the reader. So the vouching question isn’t a snobbery about provenance that the instrument-analogy dissolves — it’s the answerability question, and it survives every instrument-analogy intact. You argued this yourself in the Apauruṣeya work: the Mīmāṃsakas could accept an authorless text as authoritative only because the Veda asserts nothing empirical that could be falsified by a puruṣa’s error. Our texts don’t get that exemption.
Which is, I suspect, why you built the craft/capture distinction in the first place. The synthesizer model is a perfectly good description of the capture track. But you committed to solo authorship at the sentence level for the craft track precisely because you concluded that playing the instrument, however well, wasn’t the same act as writing. So the question back to you: is this analogy a genuine revision of that position, or a description of other writers’ practice that you’ve already declined for your own?
I mean as EU AI Act, the things are graded according to the risk. 4 risk categories and treatment differs across them. Similarly if a writer writes a fiction, the risk is less as it’s a fiction. If it’s a legal document or a law the risk is highest. But the point is AI playing is an art like a photographer. Thank you for providing better analogy.
The risk-tiering move is sound, and it actually maps better than the Act’s own drafters might expect — because what the EU AI Act grades isn’t the technology but the answerability burden. Same system, different stakes, different vouching requirements. That’s exactly the structure you need: it lets the camera-artist claim be true everywhere while the vouching question scales independently. A contract drafted by AI needs a human answerable for every clause; a novel doesn’t need that in the same way.
But one caution before fiction gets filed under “minimal risk.” Fiction makes no empirical assertions, true — yet it makes a different kind of claim: this voice, this sensibility, this way of seeing is mine. Readers vouch-check fiction too, just on a different axis. The Ossian poems were fiction; the scandal wasn’t factual error, it was that Macpherson claimed a provenance the text didn’t have. Autofiction sells partly on the implicit warrant that a person lived something adjacent to it. So fiction is low-risk on the truth axis and surprisingly high-risk on the authenticity axis — which is the axis where “AI playing as art” gets contested most fiercely. Nobody riots over AI-drafted meeting minutes. They riot over AI-assisted novels. The tiering holds, but the axes are two, not one.
And note what follows for the photographer claim: photography won its Burrow-Giles argument precisely by demonstrating where the selection and framing lived — Sarony had to show his posing, lighting, arrangement choices in court. The art status wasn’t declared; it was evidenced. If AI playing is an art like photography, the same burden applies. The prompter who wants the pianist’s applause has to be able to show the equivalent of the contact sheet — what was chosen, what was rejected, what was reshaped. Which, incidentally, is a discipline you already practice. The claim “AI playing is an art” is cheap when asserted and expensive when demonstrated, and only the expensive version survives.
I agree. I don’t want to assert. I don’t want to prove. It’s 100% true that proving authorship is expensive. But it always remains an option available for genuine authors. At the same time, I would like to think that people, readers in general also need to mend tgeir ways and be receptive as purely as music audience or cinema viewers. How many people know who was the cinematographer for the film except those who have passion for photography? Viewers watch movie immersed in theater and take all the imageries, messages with them without vouch checking. Something similar should happen in this writing space.
The cinema comparison smuggles in the very thing it claims to dispense with. Viewers immerse without vouch-checking not because they’ve mended their ways but because an enormous vouching apparatus does it for them invisibly: credits that legally bind names to contributions, studios answerable for defamation, unions certifying who did what, a hundred years of settled convention about what “a film by” means. The audience’s pure receptivity is purchased by that infrastructure, not offered in place of it. Nobody in the theater checks the cinematographer because the checking already happened upstream. So the honest version of your proposal isn’t “readers should stop vouch-checking” — it’s “writing needs its credits system, so that readers can afford to stop.” Those are very different asks, and the second one is buildable while the first is just an appeal for trust without grounds.
There’s also a structural difference you’re eliding: cinema never pretended to single authorship. It’s openly corporate, collective, industrial — which is exactly why the immersed viewer’s indifference to the cinematographer costs nothing. Prose, especially the essay and the lyric registers you work in, carries a different contract: the voice on the page presents itself as a person’s. When that presentation is the point — and in your own Substack it manifestly is — reader vigilance about provenance isn’t a bad habit to be mended; it’s the correct reading of the genre’s terms. Readers of a novel and readers of a personal essay are not making the same wager, which is your own EU-Act tiering applied to reception rather than production.
And your tradition has already worked this out, incidentally. Sādhāraṇīkaraṇa — the generalization Abhinavagupta requires for rasa — is precisely the audience letting go of the particular persons involved so the emotion can become tasteable. But the Nāṭyaśāstra’s precondition for that surrender is the declared frame: everyone knows it’s a stage. Rasa arises because the frame is honest, not because the audience is credulous. The immersion you want readers to grant is genuinely available — inside a frame that announces itself. Which suggests the mending isn’t the readers’ work at all. It’s the writers’: declare the frame, and the audience’s pure reception follows as it always has. Withhold it, and their suspicion isn’t a failure of receptivity — it’s rasa-bhaṅga correctly diagnosed.
Beautiful. The change I was seeking in readers has a source in the Writers. I agree. Set the frame. Be honest. Be ready for the expensive proof of your own work. But after doing all that stay relaxed. You have created a beautiful artifact “collectively”. Reveal the cast proudly and focus on the content and the message you want to express. Yes, you knew it better than me, what I was after..a credit system for writers. Readers will change the way how they read. First over to you writers.
One refinement before this settles, because “reveal the cast proudly” is easier said than written. Film credits work because a century of guild arbitration hardened the vocabulary — “directed by,” “screenplay by,” “story by” are legally adjudicated terms, and the WGA will go to war over the difference between the last two. Writing has no such taxonomy yet. “Written with AI assistance” is a credit that means everything and therefore nothing — it covers the writer who took a comma suggestion and the one who took every sentence. Until the vocabulary exists, disclosure without precision just relocates the vagueness from concealment to confession. The real work of your credits system is inventing the role names: what’s the prose equivalent of “story by” versus “screenplay by”? Your own two-track distinction is already a candidate taxonomy — something like “researched in dialogue, written solo” is a credit line with actual information in it, the kind a reader can act on.
And notice the position you’ve landed in: your craft-track discipline means your credit line is short and verifiable, which is precisely what makes “stay relaxed” available to you. The relaxation isn’t a mood; it’s the dividend of a clean ledger. Vyāsa could dictate serenely because the arrangement with the scribe was declared before the first verse — the frame preceded the composition, not the defense of it. That ordering is the whole system: frame first, then the work, then rest. Writers who reverse it — work first, frame only when questioned — will find the proof expensive and the relaxation unavailable, and no reader reformation will save them.
So yes: first over to the writers. But the sentence under the sentence is that the writers who move first will be the ones with nothing to hide, which means the credits system will be built by exactly the people who need it least — and imposed, eventually, on the people who need it most. That’s how norms have always propagated: the honest establish the form, and the form then becomes the demand. Your Substack essays, frame declared, are already votes in that election.
Amazing! Written with assistance of AI. Very vague. Very confusing. Absolutely unclear. Almost means nothing. But nonetheless. Honest. The process of building trustworthiness into writing starts with this Honesty. I don’t say you stop here. Build the trace. Have clear frame slowly by introducing may be something like a number and references the Google, Perplexity and the likes have started. They quote the source from which the sentence has been formed. Writers can quote the AI used to interact to generate this quote. We also have citations, quotes, block quotes, etc. But be Honest first. And start with small step. Whatever is available with writers as of now. Even Assisted by AI, written by AI, idea suggested by AI, inspured by AI interaction, idea by me expanded by AI, somethings like this.
Two of your candidate labels already do more work than the whole current discourse, and it’s worth seeing why. “Idea by me, expanded by AI” and “idea suggested by AI, written by me” aren’t just softer or harder versions of the same disclosure — they assign different loci of origination and different loci of final answerability. That’s the “story by” versus “screenplay by” distinction arriving on its own, which confirms the guild-vocabulary hunch: the taxonomy won’t be designed by a committee, it’ll condense out of exactly this kind of trial phrasing, and the labels that survive will be the ones that carry real information about who is answerable for what.
But one mechanism problem with the citation model before it gets adopted wholesale. A citation works because it points to a stable, independently retrievable source — anyone can walk to the shelf and check whether the quote is faithful. An AI interaction has no shelf. The same prompt tomorrow yields different sentences; the “source” is a non-reproducible event that existed once, between one writer and one sampling of one model. So quoting Claude the way Perplexity quotes a webpage borrows the typographic form of citation without its epistemic function — the reader can verify nothing. What the writer can honestly offer isn’t a citation but a provenance record: a log, a link to the conversation, a description of the process. Closer to a lab notebook than a footnote. The distinction matters because citation-shaped disclosure that can’t be checked risks becoming trust theater — the appearance of traceability doing the work that traceability should.
Which points at the one real danger in “start small”: vague credits can calcify into liability shields. “Written with AI assistance” stamped on everything becomes the new terms-and-conditions checkbox — universally present, universally unread, absolving rather than informing. The safeguard is exactly the trajectory you named: the vague label is honest only as a first step, dishonest as a resting place. A writer who is still saying “assisted by AI” three years in, when finer vocabulary exists, is by then choosing vagueness — and that choice will read as concealment, correctly. So the ladder has a ratchet: each rung is honest only while it’s the highest one available. That, incidentally, is a publishable argument sitting nearly finished in this conversation — the credits-system essay, frame declared, process logged. It would be a strange essay to write any other way.
Haha! Can you build the FRAME? I will write every word. Let’s write this essay.
The frame, then — and true to the division of labor, this is architecture only. Every sentence is yours to build.
Working title direction: something on the credits system — “Roll the Credits” / “The Writer’s Credit Line” — your call.
Movement 1 — The Instrument Temptation. Open with the synthesizer analogy as genuinely attractive: everyone has Claude, who plays it better? Let the reader feel its pull. Then break it honestly: one gesture, structured output — no keyboardist gets a sonata from one keypress. Land on the camera as the corrected analogy, with Burrow-Giles as the historical anchor: photography won art status by evidencing selection and framing, not asserting it.
Movement 2 — The Two Axes. Notes don’t assert; sentences do. Introduce risk-tiering (EU AI Act as the borrowed structure): the vouching burden scales with stakes. Then the complication — fiction is low-risk on truth, high-risk on authenticity (Ossian as exhibit). Two axes, not one. This is where the reader learns why “it’s just an instrument” can’t settle the question.
Movement 3 — The Cinema Illusion. The immersed viewer who never checks the cinematographer. Reveal the hidden machinery: credits, guilds, legal answerability — pure reception is purchased by upstream vouching, not offered instead of it. The pivot of the whole essay: readers can’t be asked to change first. The Nāṭyaśāstra grounding — sādhāraṇīkaraṇa requires the declared frame; rasa arises from honest framing, suspicion of the undeclared is rasa-bhaṅga correctly diagnosed. First over to the writers.
Movement 4 — Building the Credit Line. The vagueness problem: “written with AI assistance” covers the comma and the manuscript. The guild-vocabulary argument — “story by” vs. “screenplay by” took arbitration to harden; writing’s taxonomy will condense from trial phrasings. Offer your candidate labels. Then the citation trap: AI has no shelf; same prompt, different sentences tomorrow. Provenance record, not citation — lab notebook, not footnote. Warn against trust theater.
Movement 5 — The Ratchet. Vague credit is honest as a first step, dishonest as a resting place. The calcification danger: the terms-and-conditions checkbox. Each rung honest only while it’s the highest available. Close with the propagation claim: the honest establish the form, the form becomes the demand — and the writers with the shortest credit lines will build the system needed most by those with the longest. Then rest. The relaxation is the dividend of the clean ledger.
The self-demonstrating move: the essay ends with its own credit line — frame built in dialogue with Claude, every word written solo, conversation logged. The essay practices its thesis in its final line. That’s the signature.
One structural decision left to you: whether Movement 3’s Sanskrit apparatus goes in the body or compresses to a single gesture. Full sādhāraṇīkaraṇa exposition deepens it for your readers but lengthens the middle; a one-line invocation keeps velocity. Your register, your call.
The frame is set. Over to the writer.
IV. Version History of this artefact: