The Human Origin, Direction, Tool-Use, Attribution & Related Metaphysical Determination Concerning the phrase “100% human made*”

Whereas, Jon Amburn, a natural human person possessing a pulse, opinions, a browser history, and the capacity to become dissatisfied with kerning (hereinafter, subject to the qualifications, exceptions, redefinitions, and metaphysical reservations set forth below, the “Human”), desired a small personal website to exist where previously there had been either no such website or a website of insufficient smallness, personality, or dancing-fruit content;

Whereas, the Human communicated that desire through written instructions to a large language model, which model is software made, trained, assembled, tuned, deployed, financed, argued about, and periodically apologized for by an extensive and not presently enumerable population of other humans;

Whereas, said model transformed instructions into candidate arrangements of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, punctuation, and improbable color combinations, after which the Human inspected, judged, approved, rejected, amended, redirected, and ultimately caused selected arrangements to be published under a domain selected and controlled by the Human;

Whereas, no website, hammer, compiler, socket wrench, word processor, spreadsheet macro, table saw, banana cursor, or other instrument has yet appeared at a municipal permitting office of its own volition to apply for recognition as the owner-builder of a dwelling, the author of a change request, or the operator of amburn.org;

Whereas, humanity has for many centuries described artifacts as “human made” despite the use of tools, machines, templates, apprentices, reference books, electricity, caffeine, and things explained badly in online forums; and

Whereas, an asterisk is cheaper than convening an actual tribunal: the following Articles are adopted for the limited, expansive, circular, and entirely self-appointed purpose of establishing why this Site may, for purposes of this Site, bear the designation “100% human made*.”

1. “Human” means Jon Amburn in his capacity as conceiver, requester, director, reviewer, selector, deployer, and person who will receive the email if the domain stops renewing. “Human” may additionally include the human beings who manufactured, programmed, documented, maintained, or complained about any Tool, but only when such inclusion strengthens the conclusion and never when it would make the sentence shorter.
2. “Tool” means any object, system, service, mechanism, interface, appliance, implement, contrivance, process, abstraction, or sufficiently organized pile of electrons used by a Human to extend, accelerate, translate, automate, complicate, or give blinking lights to an intention. A Tool includes, without limitation, a hammer, a keyboard, a compiler, a browser, a content-delivery network, a large language model, and the tiny screwdriver that disappears precisely when needed.
3. “Large Language Model” or “LLM” means a Tool that accepts human-supplied direction and emits statistically arranged candidate material which does not become this Site unless and until a Human chooses to ask for it, chooses what to ask for, chooses whether it is acceptable, and chooses to put it somewhere other humans can see it.
4. “Making” means the causal orchestration of an artifact into existence. Making does not require a maker to personally manipulate every electron, fell every tree, smelt every fastener, write every machine instruction, or explain flexbox without checking a reference.
5. “Human Made” means made under meaningful human intention, direction, selection, judgment, and responsibility, using zero or more Tools. The phrase does not mean “produced by bare hands in a vacuum from primordial matter,” because that standard would disqualify nearly every object presently described in ordinary speech.
6. “One Hundred Percent” or “100%” means the entirety of the relevant category being measured, where the relevant category is final purposive agency rather than the percentage of keystrokes, processor cycles, source atoms, borrowed idioms, or late-night decisions attributable to any participant. It is a legal-looking denominator chosen by this document and should not be confused with mathematics done by people who own lab coats.
7. “Asterisk” means the star-shaped gateway by which a cheerful three-word claim becomes a document of such disproportionate length that any ambiguity is presumed to have surrendered from exhaustion.
8. “Site” means amburn.org, including its markup, styling, scripts, audio clips, imagery, cursor banana, pages not yet created, pages that may never be created, and the negative space where a sensible amount of content might otherwise reside.
9. “House” means a paradigmatic human-made structure commonly built using hammers and other Tools, invoked repeatedly herein because centuries of property law have failed to prepare an equally vivid analogy involving cascading style sheets.
10. “Reasonable Observer” means a hypothetical person of ordinary patience who has not actually read this far. Any actual person reading this far is, by conduct, deemed an Extraordinary Observer and may not rely upon standards of reasonableness unavailable to the rest of us.

Subject to every preceding clause, every following clause, every clause incorporated by reference into another clause, and the implied clause that nobody should be taking this seriously, the Site is hereby classified as 100% human made*. Such classification rests upon the location of purposive agency in the Human: the Site exists because the Human wanted it; looks this way because the Human instructed that it should; contains these particular absurdities because the Human requested and approved them; and remains online because the Human, rather than an unattended language model wandering the digital wastes, controls its continued publication.

For avoidance of doubt, which this document otherwise cultivates, the LLM participated materially in producing candidate expressions. That participation is disclosed by the Asterisk and is not denied, minimized, hidden beneath a rug, or described as artisanal hand-coding performed by moonlight. The classification instead distinguishes between instrumental production and ultimate human making: a distinction that is both intuitively obvious when discussing a hammer and suddenly treated as a philosophical emergency when the Tool contains matrices.

The designation shall therefore be read as saying: “one hundred percent of the final intention, direction, evaluative choice, responsibility for publication, and capacity to say ‘make the blue louder’ belonged to a human, notwithstanding that a sophisticated human-made Tool assisted with implementation.” This more precise wording was rejected for the badge because circles are finite.

A person who constructs a house using a hammer is still said to have built the house. The hammer is not placed on the deed. It does not attend the ribbon cutting. It does not insist that the south-facing windows were its idea. If the hammer is pneumatic, electric, unusually ergonomic, or capable of suggesting a better nail, the ordinary classification does not leap from “human-built house” to “autonomously manifested hammer dwelling.” Tool sophistication may alter the process without necessarily relocating the maker.

The same principle applies, mutatis mutandis, caveat banana, and with whatever Latin is necessary to make the proposition appear to have survived appellate review. The Human employed an LLM as an implement for arranging web technology. The implement was more conversational than a hammer and considerably less useful for hanging a picture, but conversational convenience is not legal personhood, moral agency, domain ownership, or the final say over whether a footer should confess the existence of IP logs.

Under the Implement Doctrine, an artifact remains human made where:

1. a Human originates or adopts the purpose for which the artifact is made;
2. a Human selects and directs the Tool toward that purpose;
3. a Human retains practical authority to reject, modify, publish, unpublish, or replace the result;
4. the Tool neither purchases the domain nor develops a spontaneous emotional investment in dancing bananas; and
5. calling the artifact “Tool made” would provide less useful information about responsibility than calling it “human made with a Tool,” even if the latter phrase must be compressed into an Asterisk to preserve the composition.

All five conditions are satisfied here, or are conclusively presumed satisfied by the continued presence of this sentence, which nobody but a human would be foolish enough to request.

The causal chain begins with human desire and proceeds, in unnecessarily formal sequence, as follows: desire; instruction; machine interpretation; candidate output; human inspection; further instruction; further output; human approval; human-authorized commitment; human-authorized deployment; and eventual receipt by another human whose cursor has, without warning, become a banana. Each link after desire depends upon a preceding human act or a standing human authorization traceable to such act.

Should a critic contend that machine interpretation breaks the chain, the critic must also explain why chains survive calculators interpreting arithmetic, compilers interpreting source code, cameras interpreting photons, and thermostats interpreting a regrettable disagreement about sixty-eight degrees. The mere interposition of a process does not extinguish the agency of the person who initiates, directs, supervises, and adopts its product. Otherwise, the invention of the lever would have ended human craftsmanship before anyone thought to make a badge about it.

The LLM itself further descends from human activity: humans developed the mathematics, wrote the software, assembled the computing systems, prepared and curated processes, designed interfaces, maintained infrastructure, and supplied language from which statistical relationships could be learned. This fact alone does not make every model output the direct handiwork of every such human, because that would be administratively inconvenient. It does, however, make the accusation of wholly nonhuman manufacture more metaphysically adventurous than its proponents generally admit.

Accordingly, even if one were to disregard the immediate Human—which this tribunal declines to do—the Tool is not an extraterrestrial artifact recovered from an impact crater. It is a human-built instrument operating inside a human-built technical and institutional environment, summoned by a Human to satisfy a human purpose for eventual human amusement. At no point does the chain become meaningfully penguin made, mineral made, weather made, or banana made.

1. The classification applies if, and only if, the Human made the Site; provided, however, that “made” shall include making by means of a Tool; provided further that a Tool shall include an LLM; except that an LLM shall not count as the Human merely because it uses first-person grammar; except further that this exception shall not diminish the human origin of the instructions; and subject always to the following subordinate conditions:
   1. the Human need not have typed every character personally;
   2. the Human must have exercised more judgment than the average person exercises when accepting cookie settings;
   3. the Human may delegate implementation while retaining authorship of purpose;
   4. the Human may laugh at output before approving it without waiving any right, title, interest, claim, eyebrow, or percentage; and
   5. no subclause shall be interpreted sensibly where an unnecessarily convoluted interpretation remains available.
2. If any portion of the Site was suggested by the Tool without appearing verbatim in an instruction, such suggestion shall be treated as a Tool affordance analogous to a camera's autofocus, a word processor's spellcheck, or a hammer's suspiciously persuasive handle; unless the suggestion was bad, in which case it shall be treated as machine error courageously corrected by human supervision.
3. If the Human approved a suggestion by saying “yes,” “ship it,” “holy shit I love it,” or words to substantially similar effect, that approval shall constitute adoption, ratification, direction, creative judgment, and at least one legally cognizable vibe check.
4. If there is uncertainty as to whether a particular pixel resulted from Human instruction or Tool interpolation, the pixel shall be allocated to the Site as a whole and the Site shall be allocated to the Human as maker, because conducting pixel-level discovery would be expensive and the pixel has retained no counsel.

Conjecture One: The Volitional Click. No artifact becomes publicly available merely because candidate text exists somewhere inside a computation. Publication requires a sequence of permissions, choices, credentials, and final acts attributable to persons. The decisive click, command, or approval is not the whole creative process, but it is excellent evidence that the Human remains upstream of the public artifact.

Conjecture Two: The Responsibility Follows Control Principle. If this Site contained a broken link, alarming typo, or color combination visible from low Earth orbit, nobody would sensibly file the complaint with an abstract model checkpoint. The Human would be asked to fix it. Responsibility is an imperfect but useful shadow cast by authorship; where responsibility reliably follows the Human, claims of purely machine making become selectively convenient.

Conjecture Three: The Tool Recursion Problem. If the use of a human-made Tool renders an artifact nonhuman-made, then artifacts made with machines made by machines made with machine tools would lose the label through infinite regress. Houses, books, paintings, music, software, sandwiches sliced by mechanical blades, and this very argument would become unclassifiable. Ordinary language avoids this collapse by attributing making at the level of meaningful agency, not by inventorying every instrument in the causal basement.

Conjecture Four: The Humanity-of-the-Audience Corollary. The Site was made for humanity to enjoy, or at minimum for a subset of humanity with sound enabled and a tolerance for scrolling legal satire. A human purpose addressed to human observers and curated by a human operator is not dispositive, but it is the sort of fact a fictional tribunal can describe as highly probative while slowly nodding.

Conjecture Five: The Banana Exception. The dancing banana, although visually animated and behaviorally exuberant, is not a legal actor and acquires no authorship interest by following the pointer. Any contrary appearance is choreography.

The number 100 shall be calculated against the category “final accountable human making” and not against “manual character entry.” Under the first denominator, the Human holds one hundred of one hundred percentage points. Under the second denominator, the result would require keystroke telemetry, a definition of typing, treatment of pasted text, allocation of autocomplete, and a forensic accounting of punctuation. No such accounting was performed, retained, promised, or desired.

The Asterisk operates as a reserve of explanatory capacity. It acknowledges that “human made” is not synonymous with “made without advanced computational assistance.” It invites the curious to learn that an LLM was used, then punishes their curiosity with several thousand words. This is disclosure through deterrence: the information is fully available, but access is guarded by prose dense enough to stop a small vehicle.

No fractional reduction shall be imposed for use of the LLM because the metric does not measure labor share, energy consumption, token count, or who knew the most CSS properties from memory. If a hammer strikes forty percent of the nails, the house does not become forty percent hammer made. If a compiler emits all executable machine instructions, a program does not become zero percent human made. If an LLM proposes markup subsequently directed, reviewed, adopted, and published by the Human, the percentage of ultimate human making remains undisturbed under the metric established herein, which metric is shamelessly fit for purpose.

The badge might alternatively have read “100% human-intended, human-directed, human-reviewed, human-approved, human-deployed, tool-assisted, semantically contested, and accompanied by a dancing banana,” but this would require either an unreadably small typeface or a badge the size of the state of North Carolina.

This classification is issued from Charlotte, North Carolina, United States, planet Earth, Sol system, Milky Way galaxy, local group, observable universe, and shall be interpreted according to the customary principles of personal-site nonsense prevailing therein. Venue for disputes lies exclusively in the visitor's own head, where proceedings may occur silently and at the visitor's sole expense.

In any jurisdiction recognizing a different definition of “human made,” this document shall automatically narrow, expand, rotate, or put on a collared shirt to the minimum extent necessary to preserve both compliance and the joke. In any jurisdiction lacking humans, the classification shall remain effective pending identification of a qualified observer, except that machine crawlers may index the description without thereby becoming parties.

No treaty, statute, regulation, platform policy, guild custom, style guide, philosophical school, social-media argument, or guy in the replies shall supersede the classification for the limited purpose of the badge on this Site. For all real legal purposes, consult an actual lawyer, who may use word-processing software without causing the resulting advice to become printer made.

The Site represents only that the Human caused it to be made with LLM assistance and elected to describe that relationship in this preposterous manner. No representation is made that “100% human made*” constitutes a certification recognized by any government, standards body, court, trade association, laboratory, interplanetary council, or person who invoices by the hour.

THE CLASSIFICATION IS PROVIDED “AS IS,” “AS AMUSING,” AND “WITH ASTERISK,” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK, NON-INFRINGEMENT OF SOMEONE'S THEORY OF AUTHORSHIP, OR CAPACITY TO END ONLINE DISCOURSE. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE HUMAN, THE TOOL, THE HAMMER, THE HOUSE, OR THE BANANA BE LIABLE FOR LOST TIME ARISING FROM READING THIS PAGE, INCLUDING TIME SPENT DISCUSSING WHETHER THIS SENTENCE NEEDED ANOTHER COMMA.

The visitor assumes all risk of pedantry. Scrolling constitutes neither acceptance nor rejection, and leaving the page constitutes an exercise of judgment for which the visitor may properly claim one hundred percent human credit, even if the back button assisted.

If any clause is found invalid, unenforceable, incoherent, too coherent, insufficiently nested, or incompatible with the visitor's preferred metaphor, that clause shall be severed into smaller clauses, each of which shall survive until the original meaning has been restored through administrative fatigue. The remaining provisions shall continue in full force, half force, comic force, and whatever force is generated by the orange circle in the masthead.

The Human may amend these terms at any time by instructing a Tool to amend them, reviewing the amendment, and causing it to be published, which process will itself serve as a practical demonstration of the doctrine under consideration. Version numbers may advance without notice, reason, or actual version-control tags.

Articles concerning definitions, tool use, percentages, disclaimers, bananas, and the enduring human tendency to turn a simple joke into policy language shall survive termination of the Site, exhaustion of the reader, heat death of the universe, and any later discovery that the blue should have been slightly bluer.

Having considered the totality of intention, direction, selection, responsibility, tool manufacture, hammer precedent, recursive causation, planetary venue, and the obvious limits of a circular badge, the tribunal now concludes. It would have concluded much earlier, but then the Asterisk would not have been doing enough work.