Dalia

«With» or «Without AI» no longer means anything! Slightly rephrasing a sentence or generating an entire paragraph are not comparable. Treating this issue in a binary way has created a lot of tension in recent years and led to poor responses. To bring more transparency and nuance to the debate, Niels Ackermann from the agency Lundi13, Baptiste Lefebvre (Cetusss) from the «Bureau culturel» in Geneva, and Alex Pugin from the agency TWKS created DALIA: an accessible scale for everyone, simple to use, designed to quantify the share of AI in any creative work. Across 6 levels (from D0 to D5), it measures the role of humans and AI along three dimensions: who comes up with the idea, who executes it, and who evaluates the result—from entirely human work to a fully autonomous intelligent system.

By introducing this level of nuance, DALIA fills a huge gap. It makes it possible to establish clear and logical rules—whether responding to a call for proposals, applying for a grant, justifying the price of one’s work to a client, or assigning research to students. It is a tool that can be used both on the supply side (artists, students, journalists, etc.) and the demand side (companies, institutions, advertising agencies, competitions, etc.).

One of the fundamental aspects of this scale is that it reaffirms the central role of humans in all creative work. Whether someone does everything “on their own” without any algorithmic assistance (D0) or delegates all execution and becomes an art director (D4), it is up to humans to make choices and take responsibility for them. At level D5, the human role is reduced to designing the initial system, after which everything operates autonomously.

DALIA launched this week (March 24, 2026). We are preparing a website to explain in a simple way how this tool works and to provide resources. In the meantime, www.daliascale.org redirects to the project’s GitHub page, where you can contribute if you have suggestions. We chose to make it open-source so that DALIA can benefit as many people as possible and adapt to the complexity of the world and its evolution. You can create variants or integrate it into your own projects (for example, a «Without AI» label).

We hope DALIA will help bring nuance, responsibility, and transparency to discussions about human–machine collaboration. Now all that remains is to start using it in your projects.

Niels Ackermann
Baptiste Lefebvre (Cetusss)
Alexandre Pugin

Article «Here is the AI thermometer: in Geneva, the «Bureau culturel» proposes measuring the share of artificial intelligence in the creative industry» Le Temps, 30/03/2024