Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- sounds a bit like Grammarly Authorship https://www.grammarly.com/authorship
"Authorship creates an originality report you can share with your professor, boss, or editor. It also lets you replay your document’s creation from the first word to the last punctuation mark so you can double-check your process."
by linehedonist - Well, this explains who has the training data to fake it then.by camel-cdr
- AI detection has gotten a lot better recently, and I've found that Pangram is "good enough" for a lot of use cases. A lot of people are uncomfortable with opaque detection methods, but waiting for a perfect solution (if such a solution even exists) will cause communication channels to be filled with bad actors who turn your community/platform/etc... into something resembling LinkedIn.
- I think it would be more effective to create an entire blogging platform website. You can use drop-in JavaScript bot detection and proof of work. You can also capture the timing of every keystroke, and build a model of not just human-like typing, but human-like composition.
Being published on the platform is the proof of authenticity, not a png that can be copied, or a link that the reader has to check.
by pvillano - by andrewfromx
- As a writer who publishes regularly on the web, I just keep the edit history of my longer articles on my github. Its not perfect and you can never really prove you wrote something unless you do it in front of an observer watching you write in real life imo. At some point though, you have to make a choice between not wanting to waste people's and your readers' time but also privacy and additional effort. One of my recent blogs: https://decodingvibes.com/blog/what-we-talk-about-when-we-ta...by altmanaltman
- I think we are reaching a point where some kind of solid attestation that things are not AI generated would be very valuable, for all kinds of different media (printed word, photo, video, etc).
I'm not sure how you would actually do any of that attestation, if it's even possible. Text seems especially difficult. Maybe photo/video could be achieved with specialized hardware and cryptographic signing though I don't know much about either so I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe all that attestation would also tie in to some kind of universal personal identifier online, so that bad actors can be tracked or excluded and can't repeatedly spin up new accounts.
It might mean a big reduction in privacy for certain online spaces that opt in to such a system... but the alternative of all trust being eroded and voices drowned out by a sea of bots or generated content seems potentially worse.
by naet - In the photo space, they’ve already worked out and deployed a chain of crypto attestation from the camera hardware, the image editing suite, and the social media hosting site.by kridsdale1
- Just like we trained on human language to create LLMs, we can train on human keystrokes with a similar algorithm and spit out believable (at least statistically) "human" keystrokes generated by machine.by mcbuilder
- Except quite oddly, virtually no one has collected precise keystroke information or if they have it certainly is not public. I genuinely wonder if such a dataset exists
- > One could work around Semoi by, for example, typing out a bunch of gibberish, leaving their editor open, and then pasting in an LLM generated texting and minting the proof. To which I would respond: why? That’s really pathetic.by forks
- Yeah I think the "how can you prove text was handwritten" question is a subset of the larger "how can you prove that a computer is being driven by a human" problem that all of the work around captcha, attestations, biometrics, and government-id auth has been aimed at. The fundamental issue, it seems to me, is that any signal that a human can provide to a computer (keystroke, camera frame, mouse click, etc) is inherently only parsable by code because a sensor has translated the analog signal into a digital one. That same requirement also ensures that the input can be digitally spoofed or automated. There's a similar problem on the output side: how can an analog user trust a digital certificate? What's stopping me from copying the certificate HTML or taking a screenshot and using it to trick people into thinking my AI content is handwritten?
I don't have any suggestions. I worry that the only strong solutions require a lot of power to be given to a centralized authority.
by kokanee - I built and open sourced something similar between 2024 and 2025.
https://github.com/humthentic/itypedmypaper-v1
As others have pointed out, it's relatively a lot of effort to create an artifact that realistically current systems can pretty well forge.
I don't know that there is a scalable and comfortable solution to this problem (or at least one that is scalable and comfortable proportional to the demand for it).
by zebomon - Even before LLMs, proving that a specific human wrote some piece of text was difficult or imprecise due to coauthoring, editing, plagiarism, etc. The important question then, as now, is rather to determine whether a specific human approved some piece of text for publication under their name.by carodgers
- This is what puzzles me about the whole topic as well. Why do we need to treat AI texts as anything special? As long as there is a name next to the text, we should care about the message instead of the way it was written. It reminds me of the situation with political ads, when after the main part of a commercial we hear: "I'm John Doe and I approve this message." It doesn't matter who wrote the script of the commercial - John Doe confirms that it is his position, and that is what matters most.
For example, English is not my native language. I can speak, read, write - I have no issue using it for work or everyday life. My own kid only speaks English. But when we talk about writing an article, I would want to polish it. I would want to put my thoughts into a better form, so people may enjoy reading a well-written text which may have some fragments written or edited by AI so it will be simply better. I would use it for additional fact-check. Communication is not a competition in language skills.
I once heard a story told by a journalist. He used to write articles for the NYT from time to time, and the process was like this: he knows English, but the NYT asked him to write in his native language, a very experienced translator produced the English text, and then they polished it together with the editors. Once the article was published, it mentioned only his name — no mentions of editors or translators. Why? Because creating a text is not just writing or typing. Often it is a more complicated process which may or may not include other people or systems. What matters most is whether the author puts their signature at the end or not.
by Mike-Kelner - I have a slightly different approach on my blog https://ezeugo.dev where my entire thought process (edits, original ideas, rewrites are a part of the actual essay). By making the event stream part of the product, it shows the process and output as one.by curiouskoala
- This is great, how do you do that?by efilife
- This is amazing. Beautiful site as well.by jslpc
- One of the best things i've seen in years, and have long wanted for myself.by childintime
- > how do you prove a human wrote something? Forget about the why or the value in it, just: how?
> Semoi is a plugin (currently only available for Obsidian) which tracks the length of time it took for a document to be written up
Trying to mechanistically prove that a human created some content as opposed to ai, in the age of LLMs and style transfer when you can just ask for something to be written in the style of Mark Twain or drawn in a style of van Gogh and get a great output, is a fool's errand.
All solutions to this end are going to be some form of attestation.
Even the proposed approach of tracking keystrokes and timing as a form of mechanical attestation, is going to be short lived because someone will train an AI on a corpus of human keystrokes and get a replication. May not even need an ai for this, a stochastic program could conceivably reproduce this behavior.
by ninjagoo - > is going to be short lived because someone will train an AI on a corpus of human keystrokes and get a replication
You can remotely attest the input devices. You can do it anonymously (long story, but doable) and without requiring some kind of pre-signed image for the while OS. (The OS passes through recent-input attestations.)
by quotemstr - Ok so what if I just rephrase the essay that the LLM gave me, while keeping all the overall message and ideas and arguments, just slightly rewritten in my own words, but without having any idea about what it all really means and whether it's correct. Is that something worth reading now, but the LLM output is not worth reading?by bonoboTP
- > “I didn’t think anyone would care” prevented me from writing, though
A few years ago I started writing Twitter threads [0]. A few weeks ago I passed 200 total threads.
When I started writing them, my thought process was: "Is anyone going to be interested in my stories/ideas??"
Dear HN comment reader, I can 100% assure you of two things:
1. If you write things, at least one person will read them.
2. It is VERY hard to predict what people will find interesting
e.g. some of the threads I thought people would find the least interesting got the most traction and vice versa. The only way to find out is to write it down.
I would also add that just writing, a LOT, helps you become a better thinker and writer. Twitter threads in particular are great as they force you to distill a story down into bite sized chunks.
One additional benefit: you meet amazing people when you write about what you are interested in. Why? Because if someone likes your writing, they would probably like talking to you and you to them.
0 - https://x.com/alexpotato/status/2012723178577985948?s=20
by alexpotato - Here's one heuristic: usually the factually incorrect, rage inducing hot takes that feed into people's existing biases, insecurities or frustrations get attention.
It's my personal experience at least, and since then I've never used social media attention as a gauge of the quality of my writing.
by hnfong - Being able to distill a story down into bite sized chunks sounds like an optimization for the younger generation, with their 20 second attention span.
It's not something I necessarily associate with "good writing". Or does the skill transcend the medium and help you write better long form content as well?
by DrSiemer - I recall a similar quote from Elton John that I'll paraphrase:
"I've had a lot of hits so you'd think I'd know in advance which ones will become hits. Songs that I was sure would become hits went nowhere and some songs that I didn't think anything of became my biggest hits"
It's been a long time since I heard this so I'm probably mangling it. A quick search shows that he probably did say something like this though https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/showbiz-tv/sir-elton-j...
The lesson is - just put it out there and see what happens
by mattm