The Future of Inference Is Italic

We're heading into a future of hybrid documents. Part human, part machine. You write the brief, the AI fills in the research. You confirm the diagnosis, the model suggests the treatment. This is already happening at scale. There's no convention for telling the two apart.

The obvious move is icons. Little robot emoji next to AI stuff, checkmarks next to human stuff. But a dense report covered in those badges is visually noisy.

So here's the pattern: inference italics.

Inferred content goes italic. Confirmed content stays roman. That's it. It works because italics already carry the right connotation: aside, different voice, not quite the main speaker.

They're the web's most underused typographic tool! Bold does all the heavy lifting while italics just sit there. This gives them a proper job. Here's the bonus: the <i> tag in HTML5 means "alternate voice or mood." That's literally this use case! The infrastructure already exists.

Is it perfect? No. Screen readers need a fallback. Humans might want italics for emphasis. The bigger point is we need something, and the simplest signal usually wins. Conventions don't spread until they have a name.

I'm calling it inference italics.