The New Etiquette of Saying “I Used AI”
Wedding toasts, condolence notes, product specs: we have powerful new writing tools and almost no shared manners for them. A working guide to when, and how, to disclose.
By Maya Okafor
Editor-in-Chief
The best man's speech was going well. It had a callback, a gentle roast about the groom's terrible sense of direction and a line about "two people who make each other braver" that drew an audible aww from the back tables. Then, in the last minute, he grinned and said, "Full disclosure: I had some help from AI with this."
The room changed temperature. Not dramatically — nobody booed — but you could feel a hundred people quietly re-scoring the previous four minutes. Was the bit about bravery his? Was any of it? A woman at my table whispered, "Why would you tell us?" The man next to her whispered back, "Why would you do it?"
That wedding, a fictional composite of three I've heard about from readers this year, captures the strange etiquette moment we're living through. We have powerful new writing tools and almost no shared manners for them. Nobody knows when to mention AI, how to mention it, or whether mentioning it makes things better or worse. So, like every new etiquette before it — the telephone, the group email, the read receipt — we're making it up as we go.
Why disclosure feels so loaded
Part of the problem is that "I used AI" can mean wildly different things. It can mean I asked it to fix my commas. It can mean I asked it for ten ideas and wrote my own from the best one. It can mean I typed one sentence and read out what came back. Those are three different acts, but the phrase flattens them into one, and listeners tend to assume the worst version.
The other part is that some kinds of writing aren't really about the words. A wedding toast isn't valuable because it's well-crafted. It's valuable because a specific person spent time thinking about two other specific people. The words are evidence of attention. When we learn a machine helped, we're not really asking about the prose. We're asking: did you pay attention to us?
We don't mind help with the words. We mind when the help replaces the attention the words were supposed to prove.
A sliding scale
After a few months of asking readers, friends and colleagues about this, I've come to think disclosure norms depend on two questions: how much did the tool contribute, and how much does this kind of writing depend on personal effort?
Plot those together and a rough map emerges:
| Light AI help (editing, polish) | Heavy AI help (drafting, ideas) | |
|---|---|---|
| Effort is the point (toasts, condolences, love letters) | Usually no need to mention | Mention it, or rewrite until it's yours |
| Results are the point (reports, product copy, bug fixes) | No need to mention | Follow your workplace's rules; disclose if asked |
| Trust is the point (journalism, research, testimony) | Disclose per your field's norms | Always disclose |
It isn't perfect, but it explains a lot. Nobody expects a disclaimer on a spell-checked memo. Almost everybody expects one on a news article substantially drafted by a machine. The uneasy middle — the best man's toast — is uneasy because it sits in the effort-is-the-point row with an unknown amount of help.
Where the norms are forming
At work, the norm is shifting fastest, and mostly toward "nobody cares, as long as it's right." A product manager I'll call Odile told me her team stopped asking whether specs were AI-drafted about six months ago. "What we ask now is whether you checked it," she said. "If the spec has a wrong number in it, 'the AI wrote it' is not an excuse. It's a confession."
At school, the norms are formal and contested, which is healthy. Many teachers are moving from bans toward "show your process" policies, where students can use tools but must hand in the conversation alongside the work. The principle is that disclosure isn't a punishment; it's a way of showing your thinking.
In personal life, the norms are the most fragile. A reader I'll call Bram, who writes cards for his elderly neighbors, told me he uses AI to brainstorm but always writes the final message by hand. "If they ever found out the words came from a computer, I think it would hurt them," he said. "And I think they'd be right to be hurt."
In grief, almost everyone I spoke to drew the hardest line. People will forgive AI help on a wedding toast long before they forgive it on a condolence note. Grief writing is the purest case of attention as the point.
The sincerity test
If I had to boil all of this down into a single rule, it would be what I've started calling the sincerity test: Would the recipient feel misled if they knew exactly how this was made?
Not "would they be impressed" — plenty of things we hand-make are unimpressive. Not "would they care" — people care about all sorts of irrelevant things. Misled. If the honest answer is yes, you have two options: disclose, or do more of the work yourself until the answer changes.
The best man failed the test in an interesting way. His disclosure was honest, but it came at the end, after the audience had already given him credit. Disclosure works best at the beginning, or as part of the story: "I asked an AI to help me write this, and it suggested I mention his sense of direction. I said, it's not enough to mention it — it needs a whole section." That's charming. A last-minute confession is not.
A proposed etiquette
Here's a working draft. Argue with it in the comments.
- Match disclosure to stakes, not to tools. The question isn't whether you used AI. It's whether someone is relying on the work being yours.
- Be specific. "AI helped me tighten this" is more useful and less alarming than "AI wrote this."
- Disclose early, not as a punchline. Information offered up front feels like honesty. Information offered last feels like a confession.
- Never outsource the personal details. Let a tool help with structure, but the memories, names and specifics should be yours.
- Don't police other people's small uses. Asking a coworker whether their email was AI-assisted is the new asking whether they used spell-check.
- Follow the rules where rules exist. Schools, newsrooms, courts and many workplaces now have explicit policies. Read them.
Where this goes
Every communication technology goes through an awkward phase where the manners lag behind the tool. Eventually the manners catch up, and they usually land somewhere sensible: we stopped apologizing for typed letters, and we started apologizing for mass-forwarded chain emails.
My guess is that in a few years, nobody will mention AI help on routine writing at all, the way nobody mentions a word processor. But for the small category of writing that exists to prove we were paying attention — toasts, eulogies, love notes, apologies — I suspect the norm will be stricter than it is now, not looser.
Which is good news, in its way. It means we'll still know which words matter most. They're the ones we insist on writing ourselves.
The people described in this essay are composites, with names and details invented to illustrate the patterns readers shared with us.
How this was made AI-assisted
AI-assisted. Written by a person with AI help for research, outlining or editing.
The author used an AI assistant to group reader responses into themes before writing; all text is her own.
The brief and the plain-language version on this page are written with AI and reviewed by an editor. The story itself is the source of truth.
Ask about this story
Conversation2
Sofia Brennan
The sincerity test is the most useful framing I've seen. It's not about the tool; it's about whether the help replaced the attention the words were meant to show.
Beatriz Souza
This matches what I hear in user interviews. People care less about whether AI was involved and more about whether someone actually checked and meant it.