The Condition Set Is Authored
I have been asked a version of the same question a few times now: how much of The Condition Set was written by a person, and how much of it was written by a machine?
The answer is that all three books are assigned Human Quotient 8, or Authored. That number is not a claim that no software was involved. It is a description of how the work was made, and of where the writing actually came from.
The Human Quotient is a metric for describing the human effort, intention, and craft in AI-assisted content. It exists because people are uneasy about the wave of material arriving from generative systems, and because consumers and producers need a better way to talk about what they are looking at. It is not a quality score. It does not tell you whether a book is good, whether an argument is true, or whether one end of the scale is morally superior to the other.
HQ 0 and HQ 10 describe different processes. They are not a ladder from bad to good. An HQ 0 piece may be exactly what someone needed. An HQ 10 piece may be unreadable. The number tells you something about the work that went into it, not whether you are required to admire it.
For this trilogy, HQ 8 means I am comfortable calling the books authored.
That sounds simple until you describe what writing a book actually involves. People sometimes talk about fiction as if the work begins when somebody types a clean sentence into a document. That is a useful story for a keyboard manufacturer, but it is not how I wrote these novels.
Much of the initial material was dictated. I would talk through a scene, a detail, a piece of dialogue, an excerpt, a character study, or one of the central questions the books keep worrying at. Sometimes I was trying to explain what a character would do. Sometimes I was trying to work out what a system would do to a person who had been told the system was helping. Sometimes I was just trying to hold on to a detail before it disappeared.
Those dictated fragments were not the books. They were the raw material.
The work included capturing details, scenes, excerpts, character studies, and discussions of the topics underneath the story: labor, automation, authority, responsibility, and the strange distance between a decision being made and somebody being willing to sign their name to it. I combined those pieces, rearranged them, cut them apart, tried them in different contexts, and read them again over days of work.
Generative AI was sometimes useful in the unglamorous parts. It formatted transcripts. It helped tie loose ends together. It made it easier to see where I had left a thread hanging because I had moved on to another scene. It could take a pile of spoken material and give me something I could inspect.
The ideas are mine, but there were times when I used generative AI to round out the edges: fix the spelling, find a more natural way of saying something, or ask, “Can you please make sure these streets exist in Vancouver?”
The characters, scenes, choices, arguments, and structure came from the work I was doing. The sentences were reviewed repeatedly. Some were changed because they were wrong. Some were changed because they sounded like something a machine would write. Some were changed because they were technically fine and still bored me. That last category is larger than you might expect.
I used AI. I used Grammarly. I used tools that made the mechanical parts of the process less annoying. I also spent a lot of time deciding what should stay, what should go, what a character would notice, and whether a scene had earned its place. The software did not sit down and worry about whether Rob Coleman would sign the form. I did.
The finished books came through capture, combination, recombination, revision, and repeated review. I cannot produce a laboratory record for every comma. I can tell you who supplied the intent, made the choices, carried the ideas across the work, and kept returning to the pages until the result felt like the thing it was supposed to be: me.
That is the distinction HQ 8 is useful for making. It gives the reader a little context without pretending that the context answers every other question. You still have to decide whether you like the writing. You still have to decide whether the story works. The badge does not do that job for you.
The three books in The Condition Set carry the same assignment:
- Redundant — who gets cut.
- Contingent — who gets used.
- Essential — who gets protected.
AI was part of the process, but it wasn't the author.
That is what HQ 8 means to me. I am comfortable saying these books are authored. AI and Grammarly were part of the process, but the authorial content, structure, and final decisions are human.
HQ 8 — Authored. I dictated and developed the material, revised the work by hand, and reviewed it repeatedly. AI and Grammarly assisted with formatting, grammar, word choice, and tying loose ends together; the content, structure, and final decisions are human.
Learn more about Human Quotient.