Disclosure is a component now, so put it in the system
By Allan Leone on
Once telling users what is machine-made is an obligation rather than a courtesy, it stops being a one-off screen and becomes a primitive. Most design systems do not have one.
The transparency rules that came into force this month create a requirement that shows up in a lot of places at once: the user has to be able to tell what was produced by a machine. Handle that per feature and you will end up with five different badges, three tones of voice and one surface everybody forgot.
It is a design system problem. The systems I have looked at recently have a component for everything else that carries meaning consistently, and nothing for this.
What the primitive has to cover
- Inline marking on a piece of generated content, at the content, not near it.
- A persistent marker on a surface where you are talking to a system rather than a person.
- A confidence or provenance affordance for the cases where the output is uncertain or derived.
- A route to the detail, because the short label will never carry the full explanation.
Four variants of one component, with one set of tokens and one piece of copy guidance. Built once it takes an afternoon. Discovered late it is a retrofit across every product surface you own.
Design it so it can be lived with
The temptation is to make it loud, because it is a compliance artefact and loud feels safe. Loud gets ignored fastest. A marker that shouts on every message trains the user to stop seeing it inside a day, and you have satisfied the letter of the thing while defeating its purpose.
Quiet, consistent and always in the same relationship to the content works better. The user learns the pattern once, and after that its absence is informative, which is the actual goal.
Write the copy once
The wording is the part that fragments. Generated with AI, AI-assisted, automated summary, created by our model. Four teams will pick four phrasings and the product will read like it was assembled from different companies.
Pick the words, put them in the system next to the component, and make the correct thing the easiest thing to reach for.
The reason to do it properly
The regulation is the deadline, not the reason. Being straight about what a machine produced is a trust decision that pays out whether or not anyone is checking, and it is much cheaper to build as a primitive now than to reconcile across a product later.
Tags: design, compliance, ai