What it governs
Whether content that is AI-generated, or a surface that contains AI-generated content mixed with other content, gets a distinguishing color treatment — a tinted background, a colored border, a highlighted region — so a user can tell a model produced it. It governs the decision to add such a treatment and the rules it must follow if one is added. It does not govern Foundations: Color itself — the surface, text, border, and status token model that already exists and that any AI color treatment must be built from, never around.Vocabulary
“Distinguishing treatment” is not a status. Titan’s four statuses —
info, success,
warning, error — answer “what happened.” An AI color treatment answers “who made this.”
Conflating the two means an AI answer that is also an error has nowhere to put the error.
Choosing a value
Reference
Nothing is decided or shipped. This section will be generated from a real decision once one exists.Relationships
An AI-touched surface still uses Foundations: Color’s status and prominence tokens — it does not invent a new hue. If a treatment is eventually decided, it is decided as a specific pairing from the existing token set (a background token, a border token, an-alt variant where text is involved), documented the same way Color’s own
“Choosing a token” table documents
every other pairing.
It also sits beside Identifiers: Iconography:
per TITAN-COLOR-03, color never carries meaning alone, so any color treatment this page
eventually adopts needs an icon or text partner from that page or from
Identifiers: Name.
Accessibility
- Color is never the only signal that content is AI-generated — this is
Foundations: Color’s
TITAN-COLOR-03applied to a new case, not a new rule. Pair any treatment with text or an icon. - If the treatment carries text (a tinted card with a summary inside it), that text meets
WCAG 2.2 AA against the surface it sits on, exactly as
TITAN-COLOR-02already requires for every other surface. - A treatment that reads correctly in light mode but has no stated dark-mode value is not a complete decision — see Gaps.
Constraints
Divergences
Not applicable. Nothing is shipped yet to diverge from.Gaps
- Whether AI content needs a color signal at all, or whether text and the Name identifier are sufficient on their own, is undecided.
- Whether a shared treatment applies to all of Invoca’s agentic surfaces or each needs its own is the same per-feature-or-once question flagged on the overview.
- No treatment has a stated dark-mode or forced-colors value, since none has been decided at all yet.
Related
Identifiers: Avatar · Identifiers: Iconography · Identifiers: Name · Identifiers: Personality · AI Experience overview · Foundations: ColorWhy it works this way
Color is the fastest channel a person reads, and identity and status both want to use it first. Titan already resolved that competition once, by capping status at four colors and requiring every one of them to pair with an icon or label rather than stand alone. An AI color treatment that skipped this and invented its own hue would relearn that lesson from scratch, with the added risk that “AI” and “error” are exactly the two meanings most likely to need to render on the same card at once. Keeping the treatment inside the existing token set — rather than granting Identifiers its own palette — is the same disciplineTITAN-FND-04 applies everywhere else: a new need is
met by a proposal, never by a local override.