Self-attestation and disclosure

In the absence of cryptographic proof, the most widely deployed provenance mechanism is self-declaration: asking the submitter to state how their submission was prepared. As agent-assisted drafting becomes ordinary, that declaration becomes the only provenance signal most channels can ask for, and its usefulness turns almost entirely on form design. A form that asks the wrong question collects false or empty declarations at scale, and an agency that cannot tell the honest discloser from the silent one is left with no signal at all.

Academic publisher AI disclosure policies. Nearly every major academic publisher now requires authors to disclose AI tool use, and none permits AI to be listed as an author: Science bans AI-generated text outright, Springer Nature prohibits AI authorship while allowing undisclosed copy-editing, and Elsevier, Wiley and SAGE permit it with detailed, section-tied disclosure. Version information is standard, naming the tool, its version, the access date, and the task it performed. Every major publisher now requires the declaration, and each sets its own granularity.

Legal profession AI disclosure after Mata v Avianca. After a New York federal judge sanctioned attorneys under Rule 11 for a brief containing fabricated ChatGPT citations, federal judges began issuing standing orders requiring an AI certification. Federal and state authorities then moved the other way: the Fifth Circuit declined a circuit-wide rule because existing accuracy obligations already reach AI-assisted filings, and Illinois and New York codified that disclosure should not be required in a pleading. Rule 11 had already reached the conduct, so the consequence outlasted the certification requirement built on top of it.

The Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework. The framework pairs a self-assessment rubric with checkbox declarations, toggle descriptions, and version tracking covering tool, version, access date, and task. The declaration is specified down to the fields it asks an author to supply.

UK and Australian conflict-of-interest declarations. The UK Parliamentary Register of Members' Financial Interests requires registration within 28 days and publishes the result under the Open Parliament Licence, the UK's Procurement Pathway supplies a standardized declaration form, and the Australian Department of Finance maintains a clausebank template for the same purpose. Each declaration is mandatory and published to a deadline, and none of them is verified at the point it is made.

High transferability for the mechanism; uncertain effectiveness. Self-attestation is the lowest-barrier provenance signal: no special technology, no identity infrastructure, no changes to authoring tools. The academic and legal precedents show that structured disclosure forms specifying tool, version, task, and extent produce more useful information than binary checkboxes.

Both precedents draw their force from consequence: false certification triggers professional sanctions, and a misconduct finding damages a career. Government consultations have no equivalent professional body standing behind a declaration, so its weight rests on whatever the receiving agency can attach to it.