> 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.

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

So the issue isn't "did a human write something", it's what the actual content is

if it doesnt take off, it dies.

if it does take off and becomes a relevant currency of some sort, it will need improving. if it needs improving how far are we willing to go? does some alternative system fork off to handle severity of provenance concern?

what happens when AI action becomes indistinguishable from human action? what happens when sticking computers in your head becomes vogue?

if it takes off and fills a small niche, maybe thats the best future.

Like I said, cool idea, but seemingly very cursed from the get go.

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).

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

It's so difficult to write, you review, edit, edit and you read it and you can't unsee the LLM criticism.