Use one short, specific sentence that names the tool, says what it did, and states what you checked — and place it where the reader encounters it before or immediately after the content, not buried in a footer.
The goal isn't to confess. It's to give the reader the information they'd need to decide how much weight to put on what they just read. ## The one-sentence template
A disclosure has three jobs: name the tool, describe the task, and state the human step. That gives you a sentence like: "Drafted with ChatGPT, then fact-checked and rewritten by me." Or for a recipe blog: "Recipe tested in my kitchen; the intro and FAQ were drafted with Claude and edited by me." Notice what's missing — no apology, no paragraph of hand-wringing, no promises about "authenticity." Those words signal discomfort, and discomfort reads as something to hide.
The mechanism matters here. A vague disclosure ("AI may have been used in the creation of this content") tells the reader nothing they can act on, so it reads as legal boilerplate. A specific one tells them exactly which parts carry your judgment and which parts don't. That's the signal: specificity implies you know what your tool did and you're not worried about them finding out. Vagueness implies the opposite.
## Where to put it
Placement follows the same logic as the sentence itself — put it where it's useful, not where it's least visible. For a blog post, that means a single line under the byline or at the end of the introduction. For a product description, a line near the bottom of the copy, above the specifications. For a newsletter, the footer is fine because readers already expect housekeeping there.
What you should avoid is the pattern where the disclosure sits in a site-wide footer that applies to everything, so it tells the reader nothing about the specific piece they're reading. If your footer says "some content may be AI-assisted," that's not a disclosure. It's a disclaimer, and readers treat it like one.
## When to disclose more
Not every piece needs the same level of detail. The rule is simple: the more a reader might act on your content in a way that affects their money, health, safety, or legal standing, the more you owe them. Use this as a working scale rather than a gut call:
| Content type | What to disclose | |---|---| | Opinion, personal essay, humor | One line is plenty: "Drafted with AI, edited by me." | | Recipes, DIY, product reviews | Name the tool, state what you personally verified (tested, tasted, measured). | | Health, legal, financial, safety advice | Name the tool, state your credentials, state what you verified, and add a line telling readers to confirm with a professional. |
For the bottom row, the disclosure isn't optional and it isn't a formality. If a reader takes medical dosing advice from a page that was largely AI-drafted and unverified, the cost of your missing disclosure is not reputational — it's real. That's the case where you write two or three sentences instead of one, and where you should probably say plainly that the content was reviewed by a named human with relevant background, or that it wasn't.
## What this costs you, honestly
A disclosure can cost you something. Some readers will discount AI-assisted content on principle, and a visible line invites that reaction where silence wouldn't. That's a real trade-off, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
What you get in return is narrower but more durable: you're not vulnerable to being "caught." The disclosure also forces a useful internal check — if you can't write an honest one-sentence description of what the AI did and what you verified, that's a sign the piece needed more of your own work before publishing.
Our AI tool database tracks 360 AI tools with pricing and capability snapshots, and one pattern holds across the ones built for drafting long-form work: they're good at producing volume, and bad at knowing what they got wrong. The disclosure sentence is where you record which of those two things you actually fixed.
A concrete before-and-after makes this clearer. Weak: "This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence." Strong: "Drafted with ChatGPT from my outline; all statistics checked against primary sources and the final draft rewritten by me." The second one is longer, but it's the one a reader can actually use.