Use Me-and-My-Machine AI labels

Version 1.3

Introduction

When you turn in work these days, your instructor (and classmates) may wonder how much of it was made by AI. “Me and My Machine” (MMM) labels answer that question with a single icon, so you don't have to write a confession paragraph and your instructor doesn't have to guess.

Pick the label that matches how the work actually got made, attach it to your post or project, and you're covered — in this class and any other New Media or Digital Curation course that uses the labels.

The five labels

• 
  Human-Made You made it yourself; no generative AI involved.

  • You wrote your art history essay on Broodthaers from your own lecture notes and library sources, with nothing smarter than spell-check.
  • You scanned your grandmother's 1962 letters on a flatbed and typed catalog descriptions of each one by hand.
  • You solved the week's statistics problem set on paper, calculator only.
• 
  Helping Hand AI assisted, but you did the real work.

  • You wrote five pages on the Dust Bowl yourself, then had ChatGPT flag your passive voice and comma splices before the final pass.
  • You finished editing your podcast episode, then asked AI to pitch ten titles and took half of one.
  • You asked AI for the three strongest objections to your thesis about TikTok moderation, then rebutted each in your own words.
• 
  Cyborg You and AI built it together, round after round.

  • Your Python script for cleaning the bird-migration dataset took twenty rounds of prompting, testing on real data, and re-prompting when it choked on missing values.
  • You had Claude draft museum label text for your pop-up exhibit, rewrote every sentence for voice, fed it back for critique, and repeated until opening night.
  • You built a custom GPT loaded with your lab's style guide, then heavily reworked everything it produced for your methods section.
• 
  Piggybacker You steered and selected, but AI did most of it.

  • You had AI generate a study guide for Chapter 7 of your biology textbook, then reordered the sections and fixed two errors you caught.
  • You prompted for five logo options for the film club poster, picked the best, and nudged its colors.
  • You asked AI to summarize three assigned articles on redlining and stitched the summaries together with brief transitions of your own.
• 
  Lazy Prompter One prompt, maybe some minimal edits. Basically the machine did it for you.

  • You pasted the essay prompt into ChatGPT and submitted what came back, changing only the font.
  • You typed “cool background, cyberpunk city” and dropped the first image straight into your slide deck.
  • Your entire discussion post is the chatbot's first answer, verbatim (possibly including the part where it says “as an AI.” 😉)

Borderline cases

No label is automatically “cheating”; it depends on what the assignment calls for. Check each assignment for its maximum permitted label, and when your work lies between two labels, claim the one with more machine in it.

📦 Download the icons

Grab all five MMM icons (PNG, 512px) to paste into your own posts and projects.

Credits

This reference is based on the Me and My Machine labels created by the MMMLABEL project at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, with label names lightly adapted for inclusive language.

AI generated the examples for this page and helped debug some HTML.