TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Ethics & Provenance · AGE 19—22 · POSITIONAL · HELD
Disclosure in competitions
The line is drafted with the entry, because it protects the author more than silence.
The dilemma
The competition brief says nothing about AI. Your entry used a model for massing studies and two of the four renders. Disclosing might count against you with a conservative jury. Staying silent might be discovered. The form has a box for "additional notes." What goes in it?
The choices
Say nothing — the brief did not ask. Write a disclosure so broad it says nothing: digital tools were used. Or write the specific line — massing explored with [tool]; renders 2 and 3 generated from the author's model and edited; plans, sections and text by the author — and let the jury weigh it.
The consequence
Silence works until a juror recognises a generated texture. Then the whole entry is suspect, including the plans you drew. The vague line protects nothing and reads as evasion. The specific line costs a sentence, may cost you a conservative juror, and makes every other claim on the sheet more credible. It also puts the record on your side if a later rule is applied backwards.
The case
A national student competition. Two shortlisted entries, both AI-assisted. One carries a specific disclosure; the other carries none. A juror asks both. The first entrant reads their line aloud. The second improvises, badly, and the jury's question becomes whether anything else on the sheet was theirs. The disclosure did not win the competition. The absence of one lost it.
Our position
Disclose early, specifically, and in writing, whether or not the brief requires it. The disclosure line is part of the entry, drafted with it, not appended under pressure.
Why we hold it
Disclosure protects the author more than silence does. It turns something a juror might discover into something you have stated, and it makes the rest of the work more credible. The norms are being formed in public right now. The entrants who disclose are writing the norm. The ones who hide are setting up the scandal that will produce a harsher one.
The strongest objection
Disclosure without a norm is a penalty on the honest. A conservative jury marks the discloser down while the silent peer advances. And because "AI-assisted" has no agreed boundary — is spell-check assistance? is a denoiser? — a specific disclosure can mislead by implying more machine than there was. Early disclosers may simply be early losers.
What would make us revise it
Evidence that juries systematically penalise disclosers and that the norm settles on not asking; or disclosure becoming mandatory everywhere, at which point this card stops being a position and becomes a procedure. Reviewed every edition against competition rules as they are published.
Prove it
Draft the AI-use disclosure statement for a real or mock competition entry. Then argue, in a paragraph, why disclosing early protects the author more than staying silent — even when no rule forces it.
Take it to crit
For work headed to a jury or a publication, has the student decided what to disclose and written it down — or are they hoping the question never comes up?
How it works
Rules are arriving unevenly. Some competitions and journals now require a statement of AI use; many say nothing; a few forbid generated imagery outright. In the EU, since 2 August 2026, generated content that could pass as authentic carries a disclosure duty in some circumstances. In India no competition-wide rule exists that the Lab knows of as of this edition, and the Council's competition guidelines predate the question. The Who is the author card on this map supplies what the disclosure line describes; this card is where it gets written.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
- Nothing yet names this as a foundation.
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.