Proving a human wrote something

m_w_

This is a good idea - and I might pick it up for my writing, since a lot of it still happens in Obsidian. If a document is worked on across multiple days / revisions / app sessions - how is that handled?

vouaobrasil

The technical solution is interesting but I think the only way to truly go about it is web of trust. Everyone knows that my work doesn't use AI because I hate it so much and so many people know that I don't use AI. It's embedded into the core of my personality. These tools can always be gamed but a true belief against AI cannot.

mcbuilder

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.

epolanski

I'm actively reviewing my writing and making it worse to avoid being accused of LLM slop. It's so difficult to write, you review, edit, edit and you read it and you can't unsee the LLM criticism.

bryanrasmussen

I mean the ability to fake all these metrics is relatively trivial, since I have written anti-bot fingerprinting scripts for automating various online services that want to keep you from automating them, you have the text you want to send from source A, you have random typing speed array you want to type them in, your chance of mistakes (put wrong character, backspace to remove, put in correct character). And this doesn't even have to deal with all the stuff about mouse movements that you don't register? Of course maybe I am just being typical programmer here, I guess lots of the people use generative AI would be defeated by copying pasting in the text and getting labeled AI, but that would also incorrectly label lots of people who have old texts in handwritten form they do not want to type all over again (of which I am one), and finally I assume that there is money in the field so producing something that allows bots to display "human heuristics" would probably get made and be profitable. Funnily enough when I was automating things, generally twitter, I discovered that my real usage often got registered as bot, so I figured what's the use. Also talking with someone who actually worked on bot-recognition by usage metrics said I was overly paranoid on some of the things I made my scripts do to appear human.

carodgers

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.

Wowfunhappy

> 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. I mean, I also think it's really pathetic to have an AI write something and then say "this text was written with no AI assistance"†. So if we've acknowledged that we're only going to stop non-pathetic people, why not skip the cryptographic hash signing and just go with the no-AI statement? I understand that the goal is only to make lying hard, not impossible. However, I don't think this solution makes lying harder enough to meaningful.

lardosaurusrex

i dunno why we dont do what the art world does and just blacklist you from everything if you're caught stealing/tracing and even revoke your degree(s) for it. ai detectors always have so many false positives that im convinced they're only put in place by people too dumb to know any better and snakeoil salesmen.

altmanaltman

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...

40four

I’ve been playing around with some similar ideas in a couple of pet projects. I truly believe that some type of “proof of work” system like this will be the only reliable way to have confidence in human writing. The various AI “detector” software that’s out there seems to be a dead end to me.

groby_b

"No information about your text is ever sent to the server, and there’s no way to identify the author based on the minted certificate" This means the certificate is independent of author and source text. There's nothing stopping you from sending fake counts/duration to the semoi server. It's a certificate that only says "at this point in time, this is the information I was provided with". You can then attach it to any piece of text you like. At the very least, you'd need the ability to prove that there is an underlying event stream with these characteristics, and that this exact event stream creates the document in question. You still can fake that event stream, but it becomes enough work to distract at least casual abusers. But really, it's the equivalent of saying "I wrote this without AI, honest" in-doc and signing that with your personal key. The value depends entirely on your willingess to be truthful. (IOW: I predict we'll see a resurgence of reputation systems, to some extent)

nekusar

I feel bad for actual humans named Claude. Cause that's this months —

zebomon

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).

alexpotato

> “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

graypegg

I'll be honest, I think this is a social issue that you're trying to apply a process-solution to solve. If someone writes "this was completely hand-written with no AI assistance", I'll just believe them. I'm already committed to letting your words fill my brain for a bit, so I don't know why I would NEED a cryptographic signature to PROVE you aren't lying about WHO wrote it. Being called out as a lier will be a LOT more painful than 1) using an LLM to write quickly and not lying, or 2) doing what you claim to be doing and writing it with your feeble, non-metallic human hands. (First version of this comment had an example from an HN thread of this SPECIFIC behaviour getting called out but ehh that’s not the right vibe. My point is it does happen.)

curiouskoala

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.

soupspaces

This was already an issue before LLMs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics

bnj

I'm choosing to read this as an option for people who want to put forward a serious attestation that the writing is not generated by AI, and are looking for ways to make that pledge tangible and give it a level of authority that feels more significant than "I promise" by getting that event-stream sent and signed. In that light, it seems like a useful offering! I think it's important to consider the risks/rewards/benefits. There's definitely a sense in my circle of contacts that if a work is seen as purely human then it's somehow better and more authentic, and annecdotally, it's also possible to win points by taking something created with the help of AI and passing it off as your own independent work. Like social credit, there's a sense that you'll seem smarter than you feel yourself to be. With that in mind, absolutely any technical solution to detect AI or attest to human authorship will be abused. The only context that a solution like this one supports is one where there isn't a risk or reward, the author just sincerely wants you to know that it's human-produced. Plenty of people, after all, produce a draft with AI, then type it all out again editing and refining and updating as they go, and then ask an AI to look at the result and make suggestions, and then go back and make the changes they agree with. Such a workflow would be deemed human by semoi - so it's lucky that there's no point in lying about it.

383toast

I do wish we have a better way of doing this - the workaround given in the article just shows how fallible this is.

Nevin1901

Detecting Ai use based on "how many keystrokes did you type and when" doesn't solve the problem, because someone can just write a program to mimic human typing in the words. So the issue isn't "did a human write something", it's what the actual content is