The badge that sells you ninety percent, and nobody ever checks it

Go to NotByAI's website, hand over an email address, and you can have a badge that tells your readers your work is human. Put it in the footer. It looks like a certification, and it's meant to.

Their own help center explains what you've claimed. "The Not By AI 90% Rule states that at least 90% of the content must be created by humans." So the badge tolerates a tenth of the page being machine-written. Four more uses sit outside that tenth and don't count against it at all: AI for inspiration and concepting, supporting legal documents, non-user-facing content, and grammar and typo checks. Until March 2025 AI translation was inside the allowance too. It moved out, and the change wasn't retroactive, so a badge earned under the old rule looks exactly like one earned under the new one.

Nobody checks any of this. They're direct about it: "Not By AI is not an AI detection tool." Its reasoning is that the tools don't work, which I went into last week, and that pride is a better enforcement mechanism than punishment. That's a choice. Asked how it makes sure the rule is followed, it says paying customers get a manual review of their project details and free users get trusted on their word, and then it says the part that matters: "While our review process and system do not guarantee the complete authenticity of the content, we are persistently refining our approach."

Commercial use runs $5 a month. Badges on their own are a one-time $99. Its business page says the badge will "Prove that your content is safe from AI hallucinations."

I expected this to backfire

My assumption walking in was that readers would smell it. Declare yourself human in a graphic and you invite the question of why you needed to say so.

That assumption's wrong, and the research on labels is unkind about it. Lanero, Vázquez and Sahelices-Pinto ran an experiment on food eco-labels in 2021 and found that people infer quality, sustainability and price from a label based on how credible the certifier looks, mostly ignoring what the label actually certifies. Their sample read environmental superiority into certified labels that certify something else entirely. Then the researchers tried the obvious fix and handed participants accurate information about what each label meant. It changed nothing. Giving people the facts "did not avoid biased heuristic thinking in product evaluation."

Labels get read as vibe-checks on the certifier, and you can't educate your way out of it.

So the badge works. That's the trouble with it. A signal nobody audits is cheap to supply, and cheap signals get supplied until they're worthless. The people who lose most in that ending are the ones whose work would have held up under an audit, because their claim and everyone else's arrive at the same worthless value on the same day. No individual reader ever catches you. The category quietly stops meaning anything.

A different provider, but the same gap

The Authors Guild has been around since 1912, which is exactly the kind of thing that halo runs on, and it built the grown-up alternative. Its "Human Authored" mark runs third-party identity verification through Veriff, a signed license agreement, a fee, a public registry anyone can search by title or registration number, and a certification mark pending at the USPTO. That's real friction and it costs the claimant real effort.

It still takes your word on the manuscript. The Guild doesn't examine the text, because CEO Mary Rasenberger says no detector is accurate enough for their purposes, and she's right about that too.

Both programs land in the same place from opposite ends. Neither verifies the claim, because the claim isn't verifiable. Everything either one can confirm is adjacent to the thing you want to know.

"Organic food" solved this, and it took an Act of Congress

The closest precedent isn't reassuring about timelines.

By the late 1980s "organic" meant something to shoppers and had been claimed into incoherence by competing state and private programs, all of them different. The producers went to Congress themselves. The Congressional Research Service records their argument plainly: federal standards "would reduce consumer confusion over the many different state and private standards then in use." That's the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, and the National Organic Program it created didn't become operational until October 2002. Twelve years.

The seal itself surprised me. It's also a threshold. It means 95% or more organic, and products between 70% and 95% can say they're made with organic ingredients but can't carry the seal. A percentage rule with carve-outs, same as the badge.

What separates them is five mechanisms. Accredited agents visit producers and handlers in person. They conduct annual reviews to verify continued compliance. The agents themselves get re-accredited every five years. The USDA can revoke a certification or an accreditation. And it's illegal to put the word on a product that doesn't qualify.

None of that settled the argument permanently. A 2003 lawsuit claimed the rules were softer than the statute allowed, and the fight over whether organic dairy cows get actual pasture ran for years after that. Certification moved the dispute from whether a label was true to whether the standard behind it was strict enough, which is a better dispute to be having. It isn't peace.

"Not By AI" has the threshold and none of the five, and that gap is the difference between a certification and a sticker.

The receipts were already for sale

The strangest detail is that the company built the real thing and priced it as an add-on.

Paying customers get a project page, which the site describes as holding "project details and proof of authenticity," along with "drafts, mood boards, or other relevant assets." Process someone can inspect. That's an actual signal, and it's the only part of the offering that would survive a skeptic. It's optional, it's behind the subscription, and the badge in your footer doesn't link to it unless you decide to.

Which is the instruction, if you want one. Show the drafts, the dated versions, the false start you abandoned in July. Then link the graphic to them, or delete the graphic.

Anyone can buy the badge. Nobody can buy your revision history.