Where does human thinking end and AI begin? An AI authorship protocol aims to show the difference

"AI products can now be used to support people's decisions. But even when AI's role in doing that type of work is small, you can't be sure whether the professional drove the process or merely wrote a few prompts to do the job. What dissolves in this situation is accountability - the sense that institutions and individuals can answer for what they certify. And this comes at a time when public trust in civic institutions is already fraying."

"I see education as the proving ground for a new challenge: learning to work with AI while preserving the integrity and visibility of human thinking. Crack the problem here, and a blueprint could emerge for other fields where trust depends on knowing that decisions still come from people. In my own classes, we're testing an authorship protocol to ensure student writing stays connected to their thinking, even with AI in the loop."

"As a philosophy professor, I have a growing fear: When a polished essay no longer shows that a student did the thinking, the grade above it becomes hollow - and so does the diploma. The problem doesn't stop in the classroom. In fields such as law, medicine and journalism, trust depends on knowing that human judgment guided the work. A patient, for instance, expects a doctor's prescription to reflect an expert's thought and training."

The latest AI models generate polished, low-error text that can hide whether a human produced the underlying thinking. When student essays no longer reveal authentic thought, grades and diplomas lose meaning. Similar risks exist in law, medicine and journalism, where visible human judgment underpins trust and accountability. AI assistance can obscure who drove decisions, weakening institutions' ability to answer for certified work. Education offers a testing ground to develop practices that keep human thinking visible while leveraging AI, such as authorship protocols. Research shows LLM use can reduce students' ownership and harm writing-related outcomes, and many students may rely on AI rather than think through problems.

Read at The Conversation