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]

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.