[mzajc]

Brilliant! Just the thing we want: more hardware attestation, more deanonymization, less user control, all diligently orchestrated in a repository where the only contributor is Anthropic Claude [0]. Comes complete with a misaligned ASCII diagram in the README to show how much effort the humans behind it put in!

Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash> it's Y" style.

[0]: https://github.com/magicseth/keywitness/graphs/contributors

[delish]

Those are all situationally-valid criticisms, but I've long thought the ability to have smartphones' cameras cryptographically sign photos is good when available. The use case is demonstrating a photo wasn't doctored, and that it came from a device associated with e.g. a journalist, who maintains a public key. Of course, it should be optional.

[magicseth]

Yes! That's what I'm getting at. This protocol optionally allows you to sign with your private key, but you don't have to for the protocol to provide utility. It could just be enough to say "if you trust magicseth's binary and apple, then this was typed one letter at a time"

There's nothing stopping folks from typing a message an LLM wrote one at a time, but the idea of increasing the human cost of sending messages is an interesting one, or at least I thought :-(

[radlad]

The problem is that it's not optional to end-users if sites enforce its use.

[hedora]

The other problem is that the device or company might decide not to attest for you.

For instance, the employee at Apple that decided to pull ICE Block from the store could decide that the "admissible in court" bit should be false if it looks like a police officer is in frame.

Similarly, the keyboard could decide your social credit score is too low, and just stop attesting. A court could order this behavior.

Or, you could fail mandatory age / id verification because your credit card expired, and then all the above + more could happen! Good luck getting through to credit card tech support at that point...

[magicseth]

Hi! I want anonymity! I also want to be able to prove what level of effort has been put in to something. I think there's room for both. This is an encrypted proof that I wrote something on a keyboard that tracks fingers. The protocol allows you to optionally sign it with your identity, but that isn't strictly required.

It is an attempt at putting something into the conversation more than just "OSS is broken because there are too many slop PRs." What if OSS required a human to attest that they actually looked at the code they're submitting? This tool could help with that.

Yes LLMs were used greatly in the production of this prototype!

It doesn't change the goal of the experiment! or it's potential utility! Do you see any potential area in your world where some piece of this is valuable?

[Arainach]

> Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash> it's Y" style.

....no. There's not a single occurrence of that.

https://keywitness.io/manifesto

There are six emdashes on that page. NONE of them are "it's not X it's why".

> Emails, messages, essays, code reviews, love letters — all suspect.

> We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity.

> KeyWitness captures cryptographic proof at the point of input — the keyboard.

> When you seal a message, the keyboard builds a W3C Verifiable Credential — a self-contained proof that can be verified by anyone, anywhere, without trusting us or any central authority.

> That's an alphabet of 774 symbols — each carrying log2(774) ≈ 9.6 bits. 27 emoji for 256 bits.

> They're a declaration: this message was written by a person — one of the diverse, imperfect, irreplaceable humans who still choose to type their own words.

Clarifications: 4

Continuation from a list: 1

Could just be a comma: 1

"It's not X -- it's Y": 0.

If you're going to make lazy commentary about good writing being AI, please at least be sure that you're reading the content and saying accurate things.

[magicseth]

It is largely written by iteration with an LLM! No need to speculate or analyze em dashes :-)

The emoji idea was mine. I like it :-) unfortunately it doesn't work in places like HN that strip out emoji. So I had to make a base64 encoding option.

The goal was to create an effective encryption key for the url hash (so it doesn't get sent to the server). And encoding skin tone with human emojis allows a super dense bit/visual character encoding that ALSO is a cute reference to the humans I'm trying to center with this project!

[josephg]

> We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity

“It's not X -- it's Y": 1

[dandellion]

It's either a bot, or someone who writes exactly like a bot. I don't care which it is, both go to the discard pile.

[magicseth]

phew!

[arrowsmith]

It’s a product for people who need help telling whether text was written by AI.

Maybe they deliberately write it like that, to filter out people who aren’t the target market?

[arrowsmith]

From their “how it works” page:

> The server stores an encrypted blob it can't decrypt. We couldn't read your messages even if we wanted to. That's not a policy — it's math.

If you can’t tell that this is AI slop then maybe KeyWitness does solve a real problem after all.

[Velocifyer]

<redacted because my friend posted it but accidentaly used my account>

[magicseth]

Oh you think it's stupid? It was an attempt to encode an encryption key that isn't sent to the server in a way that is minimally invasive. The skintone emomis allow pretty high byte density, and also are cute!

Sorry it doesn't meet your needs.

There is irony in having an ai generated humanifesto. Could it be intentional? hmm?

Is there no irony in deriding a project for being potentially LLM generated, when it's goal is to aide people in differentiating? :shrug: