I always wondered if there was some way to make a "proof" that some piece of work was human created.

A recording of the entire process of it's creation is one possible answer (though how are deep fakes countered)

But maybe there is some cryptographic solution involving single direction provable timestamps..

Does anyone know of anyone working on such a thing?

Even if every single page was hand written on camera, that could not prove that no AI was used.

Did the author come up with the main ideas, character arcs or plot devices himself? Did he ever seek assistance from AI to come up with new plot points, rewrite paragraphs, create dialog?

The only thing which really matters is trust.

That's interesting, I hadn't considered that a person might completely parrot a novel from an LLM and then claim it as their own..

I would almost give that a pass as long as we could prove that the person had sat down for 10s/100s of hours to type out the novel.

In that instance it would be almost the same as false authorship and stealing credit for other people's work. This has existed for centuries already.

As to being influenced by an LLM I think that is fine, even up to entire plot structure.. as with the above this could happen between people too.

By this point we can also discuss what is trully original and what if creative work is just "stealing" ideas that other people "created" before.

(I don't have an answer, just wondering.)

When people say AI isn't creating anything novel it's just predicting the next word I wonder whether my brain is just predicting the next word I should type here.

They keep trying this with digital cameras signing the data and it's always a complete failure.

It's a social problem at heart and piling on yet more technology won't fix it.

Right, the same assholes gaming the system with slop would just game whatever system you tried to put around them. It's not like you can stand over someone the whole time they work to ensure it's real.

> some piece of work was human created

Are thoughts and ideas creations? Or you just mean the literal typewriting?

How do you prove an idea is original and you have been in a vacuum not influenced _by anything at all_?

If anything The Hunger Games is the perfect example that you can get away with anything you want, and that was almost 20 years ago.

Everything is a remix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc or if you hate your life https://tvtropes.org/

This depends on the subject of the book, but there are enough books written pre-1970 (or some other year one is comfortable with, before the era of “book spinners”, AI etc) to last multiple lifetimes. I used to spend hours and hours in bookstores, but so many books these days (AI or otherwise) don’t seem that interesting. Many, many books could just be 3 page articles, but stretched to 150 page books.

So yeah, simply filtering by year published could be a start

Buying a book scanner and frequenting used book stores seems like a past time to start that'll pay off in the long term.

I enjoy old fiction enough that sites like gutenberg.org has that covered and I barely bother with trying to find anything new that I want to read, and that began long pre-ai-slop so no real change for me.

For non-fiction it is a bit trickier. I buy DRM-free from some niche publishers, but I have no idea which ones can be trusted to not begin to mix in AI slop in their books.

The normal writing 'journey' is several months, or years, of hard work and multiple revisions. I invest a little of my time explaining the journey on my blog, and also include the text in the prefix of my novels that it was written by a real human. It is my way of saying I was invested in the story, but it is pretty naive to think this will work in the age of AI today.

I also wrote an article on my blog that you are mainly writing for yourself and your family, friends and followers these days, the algorithm is very unlikely to get you outside of that word-of-mouth audience, unless you pay $$, go full-in promoting on social media (which may backfire), or are extremely lucky. With AI the algorithm has become the enemy and finding genuine indie authors is unfortunately getting harder.

An authoring device akin to this, perhaps? https://roc.camera/

This is great, for wider adoption I feel it needs to be an adaptable technology one existing tech. Phones, DSLR etc

> wondered if there was some way to make a "proof" that some piece of work was human created

Self certification backed by a war chest to sue those who lie.

Maybe they could prove it using blockchain!!!

No need to invent more tech to mitigate techslop.

People will know by reputation alone, which cannot be fabricated.

This has the same problems any DRM has. People who want to bypass the process will find a way, but legitimate people get caught up in weird messes.

I'm so happy I'm not doing any school/academic work anymore, because AI writing detection tools (I learned English though reading technical docs; of course my writing style is a bit clinical) and checking the edit history in a Google Docs document would've both fucked me over.

Really cool idea, I think this could open up a lot of possibilities. I'm just not sure what yet..

As for storage what is the plan/expectation for preventing the DB from blowing up? After running the app for 30 minutes the DB was 32mb in size. Not huge but over a days worth (16hrs) or so of solid use it begins to creep up (~1gb).

(32mb * 2) * 16 = ~1gb/day

Not sure how this would be feasible over the course of a year or even several months.