After my previous screed, I wanted to hash out articles of definitive proof of humanity.
How can you definitively prove a book was written by a human, as LLM writing becomes increasingly human-like and accessible?
Proof of Revision History
I imagine this will become the gold standard. Many writers keep separate versions of each draft already, and many writing apps maintain revision history in some fashion. Each time I start a new draft, I make a copy and drop it in a Scrivener research folder and title it the draft version. The Scrivener project for my current book has metadata ranging from 2023 to 2026.
Even if an author writes a lot of one-and-done stories, Google Docs and Proton Docs both have revision history. I don't use the former, but the latter recorded revisions of a short story every few minutes. Both would be subject to whatever number and duration limits are in place, however.
Proof of Conceptualization
Or, Don't Empty Your Trash!
What if those wily AI acolytes generate the book, then retype it? One does what one must, if revision history becomes the industry standard yardstick.
Supplemental notes, brainstorming, and worldbuilding documents do not prove a book is human-authored, but supplemental material supports revision history, and if you have both, seems like you're golden.
(Great news for the epic fantasy authors, heyo!)
My Scrivener project's synopsis and notes sections are riddled with ramblings and large swaths of cut text, because that's one of the places I store the darlings I murder. My Trash is filled with versions of chapters, because any time I'm doing a major edit I automatically create a dupe and stuff the original in a folder or toss it in the trash. I may have incentive to keep those files now.
Proof of Time Spent
Another suggested indicator has been time to write. Rapid release naturally falls under suspicion. I don't know where the consensus on "reasonable time to write a book" will fall, indies and tradpub authors in shorter-length, higher-volume genres frequently produce books within 6 months, if not less.
One argument in support of Daggerfall is that the book was published a few years after the author's previous book. This makes a lot of assumptions, but it tells you where people's heads are at. Another argument I've read, for the thriller that recently got canned, was even if the author did use AI, the amount of time spent writing and revising the book was clearly substantial.
For some, this apparently makes a difference. If the author "does the time" does the work now qualify as human, or at least human enough?
The Authors Guild’s Human Authored certification
Human Authored Certification is free for guild members ($150 annually) or $10 for non-members, and requires identity verification through a third-party service.
“Human Authored” means that the text of the book was written by a human and not generated by AI, with the exception of minimal uses such as AI applications that check spelling and grammar or for research.
Will this become the cost of doing business? Identity verification will be a thorny issue for a certain subset of writers. I don't know if putting confirmation in the hands of the Guild is necessarily better than relying on any other third party.
Quantifying When AI is Problematic
For the most part, people don't seem to take exception to using AI in spelling and grammar checks. Some don't seem to mind AI-assisted revisions, either. The main issue is text generation. The base document needs to be human-authored.
There seem to be a few ideas at work here:
- AI-authored books are a shortcut that require no real work
- AI-authored books can be produced too quickly
- Consequently, AI books at volume are a lazy cash grab
- Using AI to write is wrong because LLMs were widely trained on stolen work (now they train on LEGAL essentially stolen work, hooray)
- Using AI to write isn't fair because it gives the author a speed advantage
- ....But if you spent enough time refining and editing the book, maybe that's okay.
So we're making like, a million assumptions here, and I'm gonna sidestep most of that and break down the salient points.
Equating time == quality, time == human authorship will return false positives. I wrote the first draft of my current book in around 2 months. I'm not sure how much time I've spent on subsequent drafts and refinements, but I'd put the total at 8 months easily. This version is, without question, far superior to the original (and also substantively different), but that doesn't mean I didn't write the original, and some authors don't do heavy editing rounds. In fact, many authors are disincentivized to do time-consuming edits that don't appreciably improve ROI.
That being said. Broadly speaking, the quality of drafts increases with subsequent drafting and time investment. If you compare draft versions of a book, rather than comparing different books to each other, the subsequent draft is gonna be higher-quality.
Time is an indicator of quality and human-authorship on some level, which takes us back to revision history, and "is this a logical progression?"
R.I.P. Clean Drafts?
We're entering an age where being a messy human may be a virtue. Writers like me, who have piles of drafts and supplementary proof of work, should be in the clear.
If you're one and done, and you don't have revision history... look out.
They're gonna whip out the AI AI-detector, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a crapshoot. I have not seen any public, replicable demonstration that absolves my skepticism.
A Perfect Solution
A drone that hovers over your shoulder, recording every typo and running constant identity checks to confirm each keystroke is your own. AI doesn't make typos. AI can't sit at computer (yet). Checkmate.
Alternate Solution: A word processor that outputs a copy of the draft every 2 minutes with sequential filenames. Let's see... 20 hours a week writing, writing about 8 months... 640 hours, which is 38,400 minutes, which is 19,200 drafts. (Don't check that math.) Zip it and promptly deliver payload to naysayers. Docs are converted to PDF, and then to image. Magic visual comparison software (no AI!) allows human editor to observe time progression of approximately 1 million pages over several hours (days?) over a massive screen to confirm story grew organically as nature intended.
Easy peasy. Problem solved.
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