Introduction

The Problem

When you create something today — an email, an essay, a painting, a song, a program — there's a question that didn't used to exist: how much of this was made by you, and how much was made by a machine?

That question matters. It matters to the person reading your email, the audience viewing your art, the client evaluating your code. And it matters to you, the creator, because the answer determines what you're willing to stand behind.

The problem is that right now, there's no good way to answer it. You can say "I wrote this" or "I used AI," but that's a binary — and the reality is almost never binary. Most creative work today exists on a spectrum, and the existing vocabulary doesn't capture that.

Why "Did You Use AI?" Is the Wrong Question

Consider two scenarios:

A writer spends two weeks drafting a personal essay by hand. They use an AI tool to check for typos. The essay is entirely their work — the voice, the ideas, the structure, the emotion. The AI caught a few commas.

Someone prompts an AI to write a blog post. It generates 800 words in seconds. They read it, fix a name, and publish it. The post is entirely the AI's work — the voice, the ideas, the structure. The human corrected a fact.

Under the binary question "did you use AI?", both of these people answer "yes." But the two situations are completely different. The binary collapses them into the same category, and that category tells you nothing useful.

What HQ Does

Human Quotient gives creators a way to declare where their work falls on a spectrum — from 0 (entirely AI-generated) to 10 (entirely human, no AI involved at any stage). It's a self-assessment. An attestation. The creator assigns the number because the creator is the one who knows how the work was made.

This is not a tool for catching people who use AI. It's a tool for people who want to be honest about how they work. It serves people who refuse to use AI and want to say so. It serves people who use AI constantly and want to be transparent about it. It serves everyone in between.

Neutral by Design

HQ doesn't take a side on AI. Some communities — artists, poets, certain creative circles — treat any AI involvement as a violation of principle. Other communities — many workplaces, many engineering teams — use AI constantly and would be surprised to work without it. Both positions are valid. HQ doesn't judge either one.

An HQ 0 is not a failure. An HQ 10 is not a victory. They are facts. The score is not about quality — an HQ 3 piece can be excellent, and an HQ 10 piece can be terrible. The score tells you how the work was made, not whether it's good.

A Contract, Not a Judgment

Think of HQ as a contract between creator and audience. The creator declares: "Here's how much of me is in this work." The audience adjusts accordingly — how carefully to read, how much to trust, how much to hold the creator accountable for.

An HQ 0 email says: "This was generated. I'm sending it, but I'm not owning it. Don't hold me to every word."

An HQ 10 letter says: "I wrote this. Every word. You should read it carefully."

The gray area — the 2s, 5s, and 7s — is where most content lives, and where the conversation gets interesting.

Not Specific to Writing

HQ applies to any creative work. Writing is the most obvious example, but the scale works the same way for visual art, music, code, video, and any other medium where a human can shape the output and a machine can generate it. The question is always the same: how much of the act of creation was human?

Self-Assessment

HQ is an attestation. The creator assigns the number because the creator is the one who knows how much effort they put in. This is a feature, not a bug — it means HQ works anywhere, without infrastructure, without analysis, without anyone else's permission. You declare your score. Your audience decides what to do with that information.

In contexts where the attestation needs to be verifiable — publishing platforms, enterprise use, certification — there are technical mechanisms (signed tokens, content hashes) that can back up the claim. But the primary mode is simple: the creator says what they made and how they made it.

Where to Start

Read the scale to see what each level means. Read the specification for the full details. Then ask yourself: how much of your last project was you?