Comment by calebh

3 hours ago

The easiest way is to keep track of the text's edit history, keeping a block of edits over time and having them signed by a timestamp authority. The final edit history can then be inspected by some external authority, then signed if the edit history looks human. I have a blog post from 2023 on this topic: https://helbl.ing/Written-Proof-of-Work/

For Google Doc users, you can already inspect the edit history over time to verify that text is written by a human.

That human might have used AI. You can never know. Hand fixed AI output, human just polished the corners? Light rewording of a full text written by hand, because the author is not confident in their writing? Actual human text, but after researching with AI?

I am working on a browser extension to help with that. Basically it interposes on any text field and canvas and if user pastes a large amount of text (copied form example from a chat bot), the extension will "replay" that text at normal, human-editing pace, and introduce typos that are fixed through later edits.

  • Any specific reason as to why you'd want to make that, outside of intentionally enabling fraud?