6 ms·
"No, I swear I wrote this."
- chrisjj 3mo ago> Boom, definitive "proof of typing" that a given piece was produced by genuine meat-on-keyboard effort. Except it lacks proof of the keyboard - and the meat.
- ajsnigrutin 3mo agoYep, someone can "vibe code" something, that would emulate that human, the typing, the pauses, random typos, backspaces, and edits. There are probably models already available that describe the average delays between two consecutive keypresses depending on the location of keys, etc.
- sidpatil 3mo agoI'm pretty sure Coursera or edX was using this same approach a while back — they'd make you type in a paragraph of text, then they'd use the timing information as a fingerprint or signature, to authenticate you as the actual student.
- audreyfei 3mo agosurely there real-time AI writing checkers? predictability in word choices and sentence-length variation are alr available so maybe someone has to make something that measures delays in sec now. that could be a feature that op implements *like coursera/edx tech as sidpatil mentions
- khaledh 3mo agoWhat if the human is just transcribing directly from AI generated text?
- kube-system 3mo agoOne could, but the primary motivation to use AI to generate text is because it is fast and easy. You could spend an hour elaborately pretending to write something yourself, or you could simply write it yourself.
- dylan604 3mo agoDo not misjudge how hard people will work attempting to not work. Work smarter, not harder is not as widely adhered
- sscaryterry 3mo agoYep, do not underestimate human ingenuity when it comes to having not to think.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- SwellJoe 3mo agoTrivial to simulate. Though I disagree that AI writing is impossible to differentiate from human prose, at least for now. It's still pretty obvious and still much worse than human prose (or, at least, much less interesting to read), though some are better than others, and I'm better able to spot writing from models I use regularly (Claude has a very distinctive style I can spot from a mile away, but that's true partly because I read its prose nearly every day when using it for coding).
- barrell 3mo agoDepends on what’s being written, and who the audience is. Anything of any length would be hard to simulate in a way that would fool an author - writing has a certain flow to it. A cadence. The editing and restructuring, deleting of words, typos you don’t catch until some random reread, rephrasing of sections because you want to use the original phrasing later in the piece. Could you simulate something be typed? Trivially. Could you simulate something be drafted? Honestly, even if you wanted to put in all that time and effort, I’m not even sure LLMs are sophisticated enough to send the logical drafts, loops and edits that would pass a writers sniff test
- madhatter999 3mo agoTo add to this, one can’t ignore the relationship between signal and receiver. I’d imagine most people on HN have enough pre-LLM reading experience to have a decent sense of what was written by an LLM versus a human. And as LLMs get better at producing human-like text, that same pre-LLM reading experience, which helps people tell the two apart, will become less and less common.
- mike_hock 3mo agoI think you could simulate something that passes a sniff test. A writer would probably spot implausibilities in the simulation if they paid attention, but then we're back to square one, because you can spot that something was written by an LLM after you've wasted your time reading it and realize that you've been led around in circles with superficial information and no coherent train of thought, but by then your time has already been wasted.
- sscaryterry 3mo agoA human should not have to or be compelled to prove to be human. The onus of proof here is the wrong way around, the premise fundamentally incorrect.
- madhatter999 3mo agoPlus somebody will create an AI-powered program to take in text and have it “perform” the writing process with keystrokes and mouse movements and all that.
- lelanthran 3mo ago> A human should not have to or be compelled to prove to be human. The onus of proof here is the wrong way around, the premise fundamentally incorrect. Innocent until proven guilty is for a court. Outside of a court, people use all sorts of heuristics to determine authenticity and trustworthiness. Since so few humans ever wrote like the way LLMs default to, it's not unreasonable to refuse serious engagement with a party exhibiting this. Aside: Every time someone claims they have always written like this, I ask for a link to their writing dated pre-2022, and send both to all free LLM chatbots with the question "did the same writer write both these pieces". I have not yet gotten a "likely", or even a "remotely likely". It's all been "extremely unlikely".
- carlosjobim 3mo ago> Outside of a court, people use all sorts of heuristics to determine authenticity and trustworthiness. And all of those are a fools errand, except meeting people face to face. Meeting somebody IRL it takes just a few minutes to know if they are trustworthy or not. If the business is severely serious, then you have to do like Genghis Khan and get fully drunk together. Anybody who refuses can never be fully trusted.
- lelanthran 3mo ago> And all of those are a fools errand, except meeting people face to face. I agree, and that works for IRL only! But what I am seeing online is a very large push for people to stop calling out obvious LLM prose. One can only guess at the motivations from people who are throwing tantrums that their LLM prose should be allowed, because it's their idea being discussed. What I am not seeing is them acknowledging the extreme disrespected they are demonstrating for a community when they cannot even bother to type "their" idea. IOW, if someone doesn't have the time to write it, then we should be making fun of them, shaming them and generally mocking them for losing the use of their brain in a public setting.
- andai 3mo agoWe're gonna have to bring back handwritten homework assignments. Oh, wait. https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/3bzFMXhknmq5TZvVL7Bm6D/59ca869b957cc52f0b22c239a08029dc/images-2-wbaseball-note.png?w=1920&q=90&fm=webp https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/3bzFMXhknmq5TZvVL7... (From https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-images-2-0/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-images-2-0/ )
- mike_hock 3mo agoThe irony is that a printout of a photo (well, "photo") of handwritten homework would be pretty easy to distinguish from genuine handwritten homework. (otoh it's also trivial to copy whatever ChatGPT wrote by hand without thinking about the assignment at all)
- andai 3mo agoIt would also be extremely educational. Handwriting is good for forming memory traces! (Well, you'd be memorizing cringe and slop, but <insert joke about how gen z is already doing that>)
- andai 3mo agoDidn't Pangram claim to have a >99% success rate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667761 From their homepage: > Detect AI-generated content with 99.98% accuracy. Are they wrong? Though I ran the numbers, and even with a 0.02% false positive rate, that works out to about 6000 students falsely accused every semester, per university.
- lelanthran 3mo ago> > Detect AI-generated content with 99.98% accuracy. > Though I ran the numbers, and even with a 0.02% false positive rate They don't say that the false positive is 0.02%, only that the accuracy is 0.02%. All we know for certain is that the false positive and false negatives added together result in 0.02%.
- andai 3mo agoYeah, my bad. Well they don't exactly guard against that interpretation. "Up to 6000 falsely accused per semester!" doesn't exactly ease the mind!
- Chu4eeno 3mo agoIt's also confirmed in third-party studies like this https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1 (which also confirms that humans that have experience with LLMs are very good at spotting them).
- stavros 3mo agoLucid (https://www.writelucid.cc/ https://www.writelucid.cc/) has a similar feature, though not for proving authorship, just for history. I don't know if you can definitively prove human authorship somehow.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- 40four 3mo agoI’ve been experimenting with a pet project that aims to solve this problem. “AI detectors” are certainly unreliable, I’m not sure they’ll ever get to a state where you can trust them. I think concepts like this are the only reliable way to prove something was written by a human. A full replay like this is one way to do it. I think there are some other feasible ways to achieve this, maybe in combination with a full “replay”, but some sort of “proof of work” is the way to go I believe. As LLMs become more ubiquitous, I imagine products that solve the problem can be a real business opportunity.
- Altern4tiveAcc 3mo agoSurveillance is worse than slop. Also seems like an disproportional use of resources compared to free formats and editors we already have today. This product is in bad taste, and I hope it doesn't succeed.
- josefritzishere 3mo agoAI writing is not writing and AI writers are also not writers.
- htrp 3mo agopeople aren't going to read the trace, they're just going to rely on an AI grade to see if this was plausibly human written
- omoikane 3mo agoI have been making recordings for some of the code I wrote since 2011, mostly because I like the visual effect of how the code came together, but I guess it also proved that I wrote those code manually. A recent example can be found here: https://www.ioccc.org/2025/yang1/making.html https://www.ioccc.org/2025/yang1/making.html