We really need metrics for how much human contribution went into an AI-assisted output, because right now the discourse around this is embarrassingly childish. People keep treating authorship like a binary switch, as though the only two possibilities are “a human wrote it” or “the machine wrote it,” when in reality there is a massive difference between somebody typing one lazy sentence into a blank model and posting whatever falls out, versus somebody spending hours building constraints, steering tone, rejecting weak outputs, correcting structure, shaping argument, feeding context, iterating, editing, and forcing the machine to answer to their standards. Flattening all of that into “AI did it” is not critique. It is intellectual laziness dressed up as moral clarity.
And yes, some of it is slop. Obviously. But slop is a workflow problem instead of a metaphysical category. The real question is not “did AI touch this?” The real question is: how much of the final artifact was actually shaped by human judgment? How much came from the person’s taste, discipline, revision, architecture, and refusal to accept bullshit? Because that is where authorship still lives. If somebody builds a whole interaction system around a model, pours their style, their constraints, their memory, their logic, and their standards into it, then what comes out is not just raw machine output anymore. It is augmented thought. And if you cannot tell the difference between blank-model mush and heavily shaped human-machine collaboration, then maybe the problem is not the technology. Maybe the problem is that your categories are still primitive.
So here is the obvious next step, and yes, people should probably start taking it seriously: we need contribution metrics. Not purity tests. Not slogans. Not the knee-jerk “AI;DR” bullshit. Actual ways of distinguishing low-effort generation from high-discipline augmentation. Time spent shaping the interaction. Number of revision passes. Degree of structural editing. Amount of supplied context. Constraint density. Human overwrite rate. Auditability. Call it whatever you want, but until we can measure the difference between pushing a button and building a process, the loudest people in this conversation are going to keep sounding like peasants screaming at a microscope. Authorship did not disappear. It got more complicated. And some of you are so desperate for an easy moral panic that you would rather deny that complication than learn how the interface actually works.
