[ninjagoo]

> how do you prove a human wrote something? Forget about the why or the value in it, just: how?

> 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.

[bonoboTP]

Ok so what if I just rephrase the essay that the LLM gave me, while keeping all the overall message and ideas and arguments, just slightly rewritten in my own words, but without having any idea about what it all really means and whether it's correct. Is that something worth reading now, but the LLM output is not worth reading?

[nkrisc]

Through the act of paraphrasing you will necessarily have to think about what words to choose and how to phrase it, which would likely be different from someone else performing the same task. So I can’t say if it makes it absolutely interesting (above some threshold that I would classify it as “interesting”), but relatively it would be more interesting than the AI output.

[fn-mote]

I think this is a the GP’s point: the whole thing is a fool’s errand.

[AnimalMuppet]

No, still not worth reading. Do you have any ideas? Tell me about them. If you don't have any idea what it all really means and whether it's correct, then don't waste my time, whether or not an AI is involved.

[bonoboTP]

Right. But you'll never have a checker for that. How do you check for the overall idea being AI-shaped? It's a much deeper check than style, even typing patterns or anything like that. If I consult the chatbot, then memorize the overall arguments and ideas, and then record myself typing out an essay regurgitating it in my own words, how can you distinguish that from writing down my own ideas?

[AnimalMuppet]

Fundamentally, I don't actually care about whether AI wrote it or not. I care about whether the ideas are well-thought-out or half-baked. I care whether the writing is slop (whether AI or corporate PR or politician-speak or whatever), or whether the writing is actually something a human would want to read.

But as you say, we don't know how to write a checker for that...

[vidarh]

I fully agree with you that whether AI wrote it or not isn't the actual issue.

Luckily, it is fundamentally easier to measure the quality of the writing and argument than it is to determine whether a human wrote a text or not in the face of motivated "attackers" with access to whichever judging mechanism you use.

The problem will be for the people who do care whether AI wrote something or not rather than about the quality.

[quotemstr]

> is going to be short lived because someone will train an AI on a corpus of human keystrokes and get a replication

You can remotely attest the input devices. You can do it anonymously (long story, but doable) and without requiring some kind of pre-signed image for the while OS. (The OS passes through recent-input attestations.)

[vidarh]

If it matters that much, and you still don't want to, just hire someone to type it in.