Why Checking for Human Writing Is Daft: Judgment Over Typing
The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
I argue that demanding proof of manual typing is a flawed test of humanity that confuses labor with intelligence. True authorship lies in intention, judgment, and responsibility, not in the physical movement of fingers. By focusing on the process rather than the outcome, we exclude people with disabilities and ignore how tools like AI have always expanded human capability. We should assess whether someone understands and defends their ideas, not whether they typed every word themselves.
Your fingers were never the author.
- QuadmasterXLII
Why are comments turned off on the blog posts itself? I was planning to make 200 thoughtful comments with the cheapest AI I could find to prove a point, but the lack of an option to comment shows you already know the point: something has to gate participation in the conversation. Human authorship is a fantastic gate, which keeps me from pulling my stunt here, where that gate is firmly in place. You could achieve almost the same goals by requiring blog comments to hash to a number ending in X 0s, but requiring human writing is a strict improvement on this. A true devotee of “human writing is not fundamentally better than ai” is signing themselves up to never read a block of text written with actual effort again without some proof of effort mechanism.
- orbital-decay
>I don’t care whether you wrote every word with your bare hands. I care whether the thought is yours, whether you exercised judgment, whether the result deserves my attention and whether you’ll stand behind it once it leaves your screen.
Alright, compare the following degrees of autonomy:
- I wrote it, made sure everything's correct, let the LLM proofread it/translate it to English, and checked it afterwards
- I had brief scattered notes with no coherent idea, then threw it at an LLM to make it an article in whatever way it feels best because I don't care
- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a deep research agent spent ungodly amount of tokens and search and scraping requests, and put up an article (at least some grounding and it can depend on the harness quality)
- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a model did it in a single call with no real-life grounding at all
You're looking at my clearly generated article. Can you tell what is mine, what is collected from the web or another source by the agent, and what is sourced from the model's own knowledge? Sourcing is exactly what the generated text obfuscates.
- skippyfish
The fact this is AI-generated aside - I guess that's to be expected - it's a clever position to take if you completely ignore the realities of LLM-produced writing and imagine some fantasy world where AI blogs bring us profound wisdom and are unfairly targeted by pitchfork-wielding mobs.
Although there are some niche uses where LLMs assist or enhance the creative process, the vast majority of machine writing exists specifically because it takes zero effort and allows you to spam human cognition at an unprecedented scale. There is no redeeming quality to 99%+ of AI-generated LinkedIn posts, AI-generated books on Amazon, and so on.
The style-based heuristics we previously had at our disposal to filter zero-effort content no longer work here, so detecting LLM text is the next fallback.
- brendanfinan
The article is quick to shoehorn LLMs in as the last of a long list of established tools.
LLMs are fundamentally different from other writing tools because they attempt to construct meaning in a way that is not done by the author. A main purpose of writing is to convey meaning, so LLM writing defeats that purpose.
- andy99
Just send me the prompt if you’re going to write with AI. No point in trying to convince me it’s great, the marginal cost for me to re-run the prompt is zero, just send the prompt - it’s like unzipping a file before you send it to me, it doesn’t help, it just decreases information density.