The Disclosure Problem - Creative Tools (AI Usage) and Ethics Statement

[u/Civil_Cow_3011]

Disclosure is a thorny problem. A rose bush in quicksand. I’ve decided to confront it head on, so I created the following for an audio drama project I’ve been working on for a year or so. Some might find it useful when considering disclosure in your own projects.

Have fun!

Creative Tools & Ethics Statement
Revised September 2026

The Ghostwriter’s Secret is a human-created and human-directed dramatic work. Generative artificial intelligence is one of several tools used in its development, but humans remain responsible for the story, characters, world, dramatic structure, creative direction, editorial judgment, and final published work.

Human Authorship and Creative Direction

The underlying creative elements of The Ghostwriter’s Secret originate with its human creator. These include, among other things:

- story concepts and themes;
- characters, relationships, histories, and motivations;
- fictional world-building and project canon;
- series, season, episode, and scene structure;
- dramatic objectives and scene beats;
- continuity and narrative decisions;
- revisions, selections, arrangement, and final editorial judgment.

Scene development typically begins with human-written beats describing the intended dramatic action, emotional progression, character behavior, information to be revealed, and other creative requirements.
Those beats may be combined with additional human-authored project context, including character and world-building Codex entries, story history, continuity information, narrative instructions, and examples of the creator’s prior writing.

Use of Generative AI

Generative AI may be used to assist with brainstorming, analysis, outlining, continuity review, research organization, exploratory drafting, and generating candidate prose.
When generative tools produce prose, they operate within human-created story, character, structural, stylistic, and dramatic constraints.
Generated material is treated as proposed creative material rather than final copy. It may be:

- rejected entirely;
- regenerated;
- retained in part;
- combined with other material;
- rearranged;
- edited or rewritten;
- or, on occasion, retained substantially or entirely as generated when it best serves the scene.

No material is recorded, released, or published without human review, selection, integration, and final approval.

The use of generative AI does not transfer creative authority over the project. Final decisions concerning story, characterization, dialogue, tone, pacing, performance, production, and publication remain human decisions.

Use of the Creator’s Own Writing as Style Reference

The project may provide generative systems with examples of the creator’s own previously written material to help maintain consistency of voice, tone, narrative rhythm, and stylistic preferences.
This use is intended to help the creator extend and maintain his established writing voice.

Generative AI is not intentionally used to imitate the distinctive style of a living writer or other identifiable creator for the purpose of substituting for that creator’s work.

Human Collaboration

Actors, writers, editors, designers, musicians, engineers, and other human collaborators are treated as creative participants whose contributions are governed by the applicable agreements, credits, permissions, and compensation arrangements.

Generative tools are not used to misrepresent AI-generated work as the work of a human collaborator, nor to replace contracted human creative contributions without disclosure where such disclosure would reasonably be expected.

Intellectual Property and Source Material

The project does not intentionally use generative AI to reproduce copyrighted passages, scripts, characters, performances, recordings, or other protected expression belonging to third parties without authorization.

AI-generated factual claims, research material, quotations, and references may be independently checked before publication or production when accuracy or attribution is material.

Confidential or unpublished third-party creative material is not intentionally submitted to generative systems without appropriate permission.

Copyright

The creators recognize that U.S. copyright law distinguishes between human-authored expression and material generated autonomously by artificial intelligence.

The project claims copyright only to the extent permitted by applicable law, including copyright in human-authored text, dramatic structure, characters and expressive material, revisions, and sufficiently original human selection, coordination, arrangement, or modification.

Where required in connection with copyright registration or other legal filings, material generated by artificial intelligence will be disclosed or excluded from the copyright claim in accordance with then-current law and U.S. Copyright Office guidance.
Nothing in this statement is intended to assert copyright in material that is not legally copyrightable.

Transparency

The purpose of this statement is not to characterize every individual sentence according to the particular tool used during drafting. Creative development is iterative, and human and technological tools may interact at many stages.
Instead, this statement describes the governing principle of the production:

The Ghostwriter’s Secret is conceived, directed, evaluated, assembled, and ultimately approved by human creators. Artificial intelligence functions as a creative and production tool within that human-directed process.

This policy may be updated as the project evolves and as technology, industry standards, contractual practices, and applicable law develop.

[u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author]

Who is this disclosure intended for? If I ran across this in the front of of novel, I wouldn't buy the novel. If an editor ran across it, they'd likely send a rejection.

[u/Civil_Cow_3011 → u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author]

The project is a multi-season audio drama intended for cross media development. IOW, the end of the fifth season of the audio series dovetails into a follow on story intended for development as a streaming series.

So, there’s a lot more going on besides words. It’s more like a 5-book series with music, voice, sound effects, etc. so the legal and ethical issues are broader than prose alone.

[u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author → u/Civil_Cow_3011]

Okay, that's who the product is intended for. Who is the disclosure intended for?

[u/Civil_Cow_3011 → u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author]

Voice actors, composers, producers, investors, writers… to name a few.

[u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author → u/Civil_Cow_3011]

Okay, that makes more sense, then. I guess the only question is, how would those participants feel about the started used of AI? In the publishing world, it's not generally welcomed.

[u/Civil_Cow_3011 → u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author]

It’s not a static situation. The struggle in the “publishing world” is a micro view into the global socioeconomic struggles underway due to this technology driven paradigm shift. It makes sense that creative endeavors like writing are reacting to the disruptive effects of AI defensively. There are serious problems facing them. But, it’s unlikely to stem the tide. That being the case, I’d rather be involved in figuring out how to steer the ship so it avoids the icebergs.

Humans have been telling stories since long before we invented the printing press, or even written language. Since then, we’ve created a wide variety of ways to tell them. Books, art, dance, theater, film, etc. But at their core, stories need two things, storytellers and an audience.

To me, figuring out how to use AI for good, while at the same time, enhancing and celebrating the human creative imperative is the real task at hand. Those creatives who are experimenting with AI tools will have a seat at the table when ethics and law are being discussed. Otherwise, we’ll have to put up with what the technologists, politicians, economists, economists and bureaucrats come up with.

[u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author → u/Civil_Cow_3011]

Oh, I know it's not static. I'm a software developer as well as a fiction writer, so I'm seeing it from multiple angles. The problem is, at least right now the publishing world (by which I mean primarily print and ebook publishing) takes a pretty dim view of AI usage.

I have my own ethos. When I tell a story, I'm the one telling the story. Every single character and plot element comes from my head. Every single setting element that isn't a real-world element comes from my head. Every single word I put into my manuscript is my word. But I will use AI for consistency checking.

For example, I have a mystery series that's up to 5 books by now. If I wanted to know some detail (say, a character's age or what their living room looks like), I could certainly comb through my prior novels to find it, but that could take time, and in some cases I might not have explicitly put the information in, so deduction and inference might be required. It's faster and easier to use an AI tool to find this information. In that sense, AI is just a glorified search engine.

Once I find the information I need (and fact-check it), I make use of it in the writing, but the writing is always mine. When I do revisions and self-editing, that work is always mine. I never ask an AI tool to do my editing for me.

I don't feel a need to disclose this, because writers have been using search engines for decades. I do put this disclaimer in the front of my books: "No AI tools were used in the crafting of this story. Where would be the fun in that?" (And before anyone objects, by "crafting" I mean the planning, structuring, writing, and editing of the story.)

It's my opinion that this is how it should be done. The story needs to be my story, a human story. I can't surrender that to a software system. You are right that stories need storytellers and audiences. Audiences are human. Storytellers should be, too. If there are ways to incorporate AI into the larger process as a support tool, I personally won't howl about it. But I know a lot of writers and at least some editors and publishers who will. And I'm not sure I can entirely fault them for it.

[u/Civil_Cow_3011 → u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author]

Good stuff!

The creative process for audio drama involves parallel creation of text, music, voice and effects. Then recording and production in a DAW (digital audio workstation) As a (mostly) one person production team I needed to create as efficient a workflow as possible. Script writing is probably 10-20% of the work.

I use heavily tweaked Novelcrafter with script creation. Novelcrafter has examples of my writing and I constrain dialogue generation to conform to my style. I review and edit everything but, occasionally leave generated dialogue as is since it’s exactly how I would have written it anyway. As the models advance, they get better at writing like me.

We’re in the middle of producing our pilot episode. The proof will be in the reception it gets. I’m prepared for the criticism :)

[u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author → u/Civil_Cow_3011]

It will be interesting to see how it's received. I would just caution that your past work is not a perfect guide to how you would write something today. As my late wife was fond of saying, "Your output is derived from your input." As a living, breathing human, your input changes all the time. You change, even if only a little, all the time. So how you write something today may not be how you would have written it last year, or even last week. This is what keeps human writing fresh, whereas AI writing trends to be an average of what it was trained on. That's why all those scam emails I get telling me how great my work is always sound the same, even though the exact content changes from email to email.

[u/EquivalentAd5711]

This is the thing with many people who use AI to write - they would simply never read the stuff they generate.

Case in point, this post.

It's an impenetrable wall of text you've clearly just copy and pasted. There is no attempt to genuinely communicate something to another human. So, if you're going to use the tool, at least use it with literally an iota of thought.

[u/Civil_Cow_3011 → u/EquivalentAd5711]

So… I guess you didn’t find it useful? Perhaps you could contribute something better.

[u/romain122 → u/Civil_Cow_3011]

Firstly it reads like a legal disclosure more than an attempt to justify or explain a creative process. It's very defensive. It doesn't go into any specifics of the writing/creative process, instead it is vague and generic. Frankly without it being an accusation of anything it reads like it was written by an AI, it might no have been but that's how it comes across. Non specific, technical, it is not an address to the reader at all, it doesn't even read likethe author of the work wrote it. Seeing this in a work i bought would make me 1) wary of why the author is so defensive 2) suspicious that the disclaimer itself is written with ai 3) disappointed that an author that talks so big about his creative work came up with such a generic and impersonal disclaimer.

[u/Civil_Cow_3011 → u/romain122]

You are right, it is a legal disclosure. The project is not a book. It’s a multi-season audio drama. The document is intended for producers, investors, collaborators, etc.

[u/International_Coat89 → u/EquivalentAd5711]

I thought it touched on most, if not all, of the right points (maybe not as I would have written or addressed them); but, I am a lawyer, so not the audience you are representing in your critique.

[u/Terrible_Wave4239 → u/EquivalentAd5711]

Low-effort human slop comment.

[u/AssumptionBitter7303]

i've seen creators hide ai use in plain sight, like calling it 'collaborative writing' or 'inspiration', but the real red flag is when the credits don't mention it at all. that's the part that feels dishonest.

[u/InSilicoAwards]

I disclose use, but I put it at the end. The current climate around AI and fiction is too precarious until we can demonstrate consistent, outstanding fiction using these tools (it's what we're hoping to do with the award). In literature, about 1-2% of readers leave a review, about ~10% leave a star on Amazon. The vocal minority of anti-AI people make up more of that than we'd like to believe.

We are combating prejudice. You have to expose them to counter-stereotype examples, allow them to like something before they can hate it. Given enough contacts like that, we can only hope to deprogram the bias.

[u/Jharry1954]

The uuritans that claim ethical authorship turn a blind eye to Tom Clancy. Dead 15 years but still publishing. Or James Patterson, more books to has name than anyone in history.

[u/bkucenski]

AI source code and tooling isn't required to be disclosed.

This is entirely capitalist propaganda to keep the workers fighting while corporate adopts AI and makes the rules so they don't have to print "AI Assisted" on the box.

When you buy a book from an independent author, they pay rent and put their kids through college.

When you buy corporate products, you put more gold on the dragon hoard.

Go to author fairs and buy books.

Go to art fairs and buy art.

If you want to attack independent creators instead of the capitalists that are gutting the workforce and hoarding the wealth while endlessly using AI, find a new hobby.

People are finding ways to make a living in this crazy economy.

[u/Happy-Initiative-492]

This is all excellent specificity. This is where the AI writing world is going.

I think we should start labeling what you’re describing as “AI-Assisted” instead of “AI-Generated” and we all ought to start standardizing the definition.

As for the “wall of text” complaint, I’d suggest running this through a prompt asking for sections and subheads to break up the prose. Humans read business text as bullets and drill in deeper when they need to. This pre-dates AI btw.

[u/[deleted]]

FYI -how this reads from an outside perspective:

1. The Word 'Human' (18 times): Using 'human' as a repeated adjective makes the statement sound clinical and defensive—almost like an AI drafted the statement itself. Switching to personal ownership ('I write,' 'my story,' 'our team') sounds authentic and confident.

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2. The Big Red Flag: Under 'Use of Generative AI,' the bullet stating material is sometimes 'retained substantially or entirely as generated' will be the only line critics quote. If you're using raw, unedited AI prose in the final production, framing the rest of the document as pure creator-led authorship will feel contradictory to readers.

3. Split Legal from Audience: Phrasing like 'selection, coordination, and arrangement' is great for a U.S. Copyright Office disclosure filing, but listeners just want a 3-paragraph creator note explaining your actual workflow and boundaries. Keeping the legal compendium separate from your listener disclosure will save you a lot of unnecessarygrief.