Why Every Post on My Blog Has an AI Badge

Scroll to the bottom of any post on my blog and you'll find a small badge. It tells you how much AI went into what you just read.

Go back far enough and they all say No AI. Everything I wrote between 2018 and 2021, the climate posts, the campervan trip, my year reviews, was typed by me.

Everything since I restarted the blog in 2025 says AI Assisted. Every single one.

I didn't plan to draw a line through my own archive. But it's there, and I'd rather point at it than pretend it isn't.

How I ended up here

When I revived the blog, I co-wrote the first post with ChatGPT. I fed it my old posts, let it interview me, answered out loud with a dictation tool, then edited what came back. It sounded like me. It was me, mostly.

Straight after, I wrote Did I Write That Blog Post? because I genuinely wasn't sure. My answer was “kind of.” I still think that's the honest one.

What bothered me wasn't using AI. It was that nobody reading would know unless I told them, and there was no simple, shared way to tell them.

Why a badge and not a disclaimer

You could put a line at the top of every post. I didn't want to. “This post was written with help from AI” reads like an apology, a warning label stuck on something I'm proud of.

A badge does the same job without the drama. It's small, it sits in the same place every time, and you learn what it means after seeing it once. It's the difference between a confession and a nutrition label.

So I made three, and put them on AI Honesty Badge for anyone to use:

• No AI: made by a person, start to finish
• AI Assisted: I led the work and AI helped along the way
• AI Generated: AI made most of it, and my part was directing and reviewing

Where I draw the line

Picking a badge isn't the hard part. Being honest about the middle is.

My rule for AI Assisted is simple. I decide what the post is about. The stories and opinions are mine. I edit every line, and I'd happily defend any of it. If any of that stops being true, it's AI Generated, and I'll say so.

Spell check doesn't count. Asking ChatGPT for a better word than “important” probably doesn't either. Handing it a topic and publishing whatever comes back definitely does.

You'll draw your lines in slightly different places, and that's fine. The badge isn't a standard. It's a promise.

Nobody checks, and that's the point

There's no verification. Anyone can stick a No AI badge on something ChatGPT wrote.

I know. It works like an honesty box at a farm gate. Nobody's watching, most people pay anyway, and the few who don't are mostly cheating themselves.

What's surprised me is how differently people use them. Baystation12, a long-running Space Station 13 game server, puts the No AI badge in its README under one blunt line: “Generative AI is not welcome here.” Jake Cozart labels each of his open-source projects separately, some AI Assisted, some AI Generated. Mark Hall adds one to posts where AI made the images or checked his logic.

Three very different positions on AI. Same three badges. That's exactly what I hoped for.

Won't it put people off?

Some readers will see AI Assisted and stop reading. I've made peace with that.

The alternative is worse. I've noticed it in myself: the more AI stuff turns up in my feeds, the less I trust any of it. Getting caught hiding AI costs far more than admitting to it. I'd rather lose a reader up front than lose their trust later.

Adding one to your own work

Pick the badge that's honest, copy the snippet, and paste it wherever you want it to show. There's HTML for websites and Markdown for GitHub READMEs. It's free for anything, including commercial work, and there's nothing to install.

If you're not sure which one fits, the No AI, AI Assisted and AI Generated pages each explain where the lines sit. And if you use one, tell me. I'll add you to the Honesty Wall.

This post has a badge too. You can probably guess which one.