As AI tools become a part of the research process, disclosure becomes a matter of academic integrity. At the same time, the call to disclose can be complicated by the sheer ubiquity of such tools, operating silently in the background of everyday scholarly activity, such as search or grammar correction. The transparency of intellectual labor has also been a major part of my recent work, a book called Author Function coming out soon at Chicago University Press.

I include the following disclosure at the end of my manuscript, which I now believe should cover all of my intellectual output:

This work was written using contemporary digital writing tools, including spelling and grammar checkers, reference management software, search engines, and, on a limited basis, large language models. Such systems were used as editorial and exploratory aids: to interrogate thought, identify turgid prose, test alternative formulations, summarize notes, discuss methodological alternatives, and assist with formatting. They were not used to generate claims or historical evidence. All sources were selected and verified by the author, who takes responsibility for the study design, interpretations, and conclusions.

Given that this study examines the history of literary automation, distributed cognition, and machine-assisted authorship, the writing process itself reflects the continuity between past and present techniques of composition. Rather than treating these tools as external or exceptional, I regard them as part of the long-standing infrastructure of collective intellectual labor that this book seeks to describe.

To put it more simply: This document was created using human intelligence.

A detailed manifest of labor and specific contributions can be found on my Github pages, and soon at Lab Notes—a journal dedicated to transparency in the scholarly process.