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Hacker News
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
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
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
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
> 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
> “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
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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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
- 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
- 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
- > 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 - > “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