An AI Bill of Rights

This was 2023. The models were new, the press was loud, and customers were being asked to let software act on their behalf inside their own books. Nobody was worried about tone. They were worried about whether a company with their bank feed should be allowed to make moves without asking.

So content design wrote an AI Bill of Rights: a statement to leadership about what AI in our products would and would not do to someone’s financial data. Not a style guide. A set of limits, written before the thing that needed limiting had shipped.

My old portfolio said this took “a lot of testing, collaboration, and spirited debate.” That was flattering and mostly untrue. There wasn’t much debate, because we stopped having the conversation that produces debate.

Every generated draft went onto a Likert scale and into a very large spreadsheet. Quality, voice, tone, one row at a time. Once a stakeholder is looking at a column of numbers, “I don’t like it” turns into “I scored it a two, and here is why.” That is a completely different meeting.

The honest finding, in 2023, was binary. Output was either bad or not bad. The models weren’t good enough for finer distinctions, and pretending otherwise would have wasted everyone’s time. Naming that plainly is what let us ship anything at all.

Product teams picked them up when they built governance for Intuit Enterprise Suite, the company’s move upmarket from small businesses toward larger, more complex ones. I wasn’t in those rooms. The document was.

That’s the outcome I’d point at. Not that we wrote something good, but that it travelled to a part of the business none of us worked on.

They’re behind a login I lost in a layoff. I helped write them and I cannot reconstruct them, not really. The rules I could approximate. The reasoning is gone: why we drew each line where we drew it, which argument each one settled, what we were afraid of in the room that week.

That loss is normal and almost nobody plans for it. Institutional memory in tech is a handful of people who happen to still work there, and the actual reason for a decision is usually one of two things: evidence, or the highest-paid person had an opinion on a Tuesday. Only one of those survives being written down, and neither survives a badge getting turned off.

Everything I’ve built since keeps its decisions, and the why underneath them, in plain files I own. Every rule carries its reasoning, because I have already been the person who couldn’t remember.