[calebh]

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.

[visarga]

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?

[theoreticalmal]

Exactly. Detecting AI writing is an arms race that can only end with detection coming in second place.

[warkdarrior]

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.

[bulder]

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

[warkdarrior]

People should be allowed to use any tools they find useful, and their writing should be judged on quality.

[echoangle]

In all contexts? If there is a paper to hand in and the instructions are that you’re not allowed to use LLMs, do you think it’s fine to circumvent that? If you have a math exam, would you say you can still use a hidden calculator even if calculators are forbidden?

[Footprint0521]

As a verbal processor, I hate this. I use whisper v3 large all the time from voice memo dumps that are AI grammar corrected and this would flag when I copy paste it in :/

I wish there was a solution

[duskdozer]

Use it to transcribe directly without correcting grammar or formatting.

[throwaway219450]

Nevertheless this PoW is used by some conference venues now, in the case of a dispute against human authorship. NeurIPS does allow LLM use for "minor" polish like spelling, grammar, correcting non-native speakers. But you can't have the AI write the entire paper:

See https://blog.neurips.cc/2026/06/02/ai-generated-papers-in-th...

> Unfortunately, given the volume of submissions that appear non-compliant, relying on author declarations is insufficient.

...

> Authors whose submissions show significant AI involvement must provide an audit trail that clearly demonstrates that they complied with the policy. We expect that in future years this kind of audit trail will become a default.

The method uses Pangram, but that's somewhat arbitrary. The authors must provide the draft that was used to prompt the AI and show how the changes were made, which should be possible with a chat history. Where it doesn't work is if the authors claim they did not use AI, but otherwise it's quite hard to spoof. Edit history on its own isn't good enough because you could trivially have a program emulate keystrokes to type at a human speed into a document with tracked changes; the proof here accepts that AI was probably used and aims to determine to what extent.

I do think this goes back to if the text is high quality enough that humans don't notice, is that OK? Probably yes. What we don't want is poor quality writing from any source.