I feel bad for actual humans named Claude. Cause that's this months —
Proving a human wrote something
21–30 of 88 posts
Re: Proving a human wrote something
#22I 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).
Re: Proving a human wrote something
#23> “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
Re: Proving a human wrote something
#24I'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.)
Re: Proving a human wrote something
#25i 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.
(redacted) misunderstood oc
Re: Proving a human wrote something
#26I 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.
Re: Proving a human wrote something
#27This was already an issue before LLMs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics
Re: Proving a human wrote something
#28i 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.
(redacted) misunderstood oc
[flagged]
Re: Proving a human wrote something
#29I'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 m…
That's actually a good point. Plenty of people just want to let their beliefs out in public. And there's not much benefit to lie about AI use. Some people use it and some people don't, and it's two very different groups of people.
Re: Proving a human wrote something
#30I'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.