Track Changes attributes edits by name, not by author type

The writer's problem

Some editors and publishers have proposed a low-cost fix for disclosing AI-assisted edits: turn on a word processor's existing change-tracking feature and let it record what a tool changed, rather than adopting a new disclosure format. Whether that repurposing works depends on what Track Changes actually records, which Microsoft's own support article on Track Changes in Word, retrieved 16 September 2026, and a companion article on changing the user name Word assigns to edits, retrieved the same day, both describe.

What the documents show

The Track Changes article states deletions are marked with a strikethrough and additions with an underline, and that different authors' changes are indicated with different colors, with a Show Markup menu that separates insertions and deletions from formatting changes and lets a user filter by reviewer name. The companion article states plainly that the name attached to those edits is not tied to a verified account: you can enter anything you like in Word's options, though it suggests considering who might see the document before choosing a name. Read together, the two pages show that Track Changes attributes an edit to a self-declared name and a color, with categories for insertions, deletions and formatting, but no field for what tool produced the edit or whether a human or a model authored it.

The editorial choice

An editor adopting Track Changes as an AI-disclosure mechanism is repurposing a feature built for a different job: distinguishing reviewers from each other, not distinguishing a person from a model. This can still be made to work as an editorial convention, for instance by asking a contributor to set the Word user name to something like AI draft before generating text, but that convention is an editorial workaround layered on top of a feature that Microsoft's own documentation does not describe as a disclosure tool.

What stays with the author

Because the name field is self-entered, nothing in Word verifies that a document consistently labels AI-generated passages this way across every editing session or every contributor. The responsibility for keeping that labeling accurate through revision after revision remains with the writer and editor, not with the software.

• If Track Changes is used for AI disclosure, is the naming convention documented somewhere the next editor will see it?
• Does the color-and-name system survive a document being reopened by a different editor with different Word settings?
• Would a reviewer unfamiliar with the convention correctly read what the tracked changes are claiming?

Track Changes can carry a disclosure convention, but Microsoft's documentation describes a reviewer-attribution feature built before generative drafting existed, not a purpose-built AI-disclosure format.