Progress Report on AI Draft Comparison
Keeping the original draft open alongside the AI rewrite produces a private audit nobody requested.
REPORTING PERIOD: Q2 2023 STATUS: Ongoing, no resolution anticipated in current quarter
BACKGROUND: A person uses an AI tool to generate a draft of a document they are responsible for producing. The tool produces a usable draft. The person revises it. The person submits it. Prior to submission, they have performed a comparison between their original notes, the AI draft, and the revised final version. This comparison is private, undocumented, and repeated for every similar task.
AI draft comparison adds one private manual check to the workflow. The check is not part of the official process. No one assigned it. The person added it because submitting a document that is predominantly AI-generated without any personal contribution feels wrong in a way they have not been asked to define and have not defined for themselves.
The check is not about quality. It is about attribution, which is a different problem entirely. The quality question is answered by review. The attribution question is answered by the comparison, which determines, to the person's own satisfaction, whether their contribution was substantive. The threshold for substantive is not specified anywhere.
The help is useful enough to use and awkward enough to disguise. Both things are true simultaneously and neither resolves the other. The tool is used because it produces better first drafts than the person would produce alone in the same time. The use is partially concealed because the norms around disclosure have not caught up with the speed of adoption.
That check becomes part of the normal workflow. It appears in the time allocated for drafting. It is not visible in the final product. It is not reported. Assisted work becomes routine while disclosure stays exceptional, producing a gap neither party formally acknowledged.
Under the governing rule, AI draft comparison becomes procedure once repetition feels safer than reconsidering it. The comparison continues each time. Nobody has asked for it. Nobody has removed the reason for it.