I was thinking today about AI detection and about how people are concerned that there is no reliable way of telling if text is written by AI. I think there is probably a not-too-difficult way of doing AI detection (please if you are a tech person, take this idea from me, for the love of god.) The problem is that we should not be looking at the CONTENT of what people write (which is what these imperfect programs do), but HOW people write. If I am writing a 3k Substack article, I could show you a screenshot of my versions history where you could see multiple different versions saved over time with slow programs and small changes between them—this is a not perfect but reasonable way of showing you it was not written by AI. When I write, I type about 50-60 words per minute, but make tons of typos. I write a few sentences, then pause to think. I write dialogue rapidly, but then I go back up two paragraphs and realize that I wrote “their” instead of “there.” I delete an entire paragraph when I realize it is stupid. In other words, there could be a signature of HOW I write that is inherently human. AI, on the other hand— when I’ve seen Gemini or Claude write, you ask it a question and it “thinks” for a while, then it spits out a large amount of text. The text appears more rapidly than I could type. It does not do strange things like go back two pages and change something, or pause to look up “how fast can you kill someone by garroting” or consistently spell “bureaucracy” wrong. If you were using AI within the writing platform, the behaviors of using AI to write text would not look human. It would also not look human if you copy pasted from a large amount of text from another location into Substack’s editor, for example. But of course many people write on word processing software. But maybe this is something they can offer, the first improvement that might actually be interesting in years? What if Word actually worked on some form of authenticity thumbprint rather than that shit Copilot which no one uses? A thumbprint would be a better means of authentification than what the Authors Guild is proposing, which is the honor system.