This was something that bugged me while writing. Someone even asked, What's the point if people aren't going to read the whole thing? Reading this made my day, not just because of the content, but because someone else cared enough to tackle the same problem. Good one, Sire.
If I had handwritten this, there would be at least one (likely lots more) errors in writing crossed out mingled in with the text. That there isn't makes me wonder why such a lengthy sample contains seemingly zero handwriting errors. Is that plausible?
EDIT: After seeing the comments, I am realizing how little I ever rewrote my own writings, an admitted weakness of mine. It was the blindspot behind which I made my reply!
You can handwrite more than just your first draft. It was common before the proliferation of computers to handwrite early drafts in pencil, and then handwrite the final manuscript with ink.
> It was common before the proliferation of computers
We always had to write our first couple drafts in pencil/handwritten in school. Eventually we moved to typing the final draft by the time I hit high school but exams were always handwritten still and now I feel quite "old" at 38 knowing that there are adults on this very forum that probably did not have to handwrite much beyond elementary school.
In grammar school in the 90s, I used to write in pencil, then retrace in pen when done, erasing the underlying pencil after the ink dried. I'd proofread the pencil version, find missing words, and you could rewrite to balance out space
I think that was pretty common amongst "keeners" doing writing assignments.
I don't know if it's universal, but your non-dominant hand may form reflected letters delightfully easily if you air-write simultaneously with your dominant hand.
Typewriters work too. I’m toying with the idea of starting an online journal that only accepts submissions written by hand or by mechanical typewriters.
I've been debating switching my blog to a vlog that is a one shot recording, no retakes, just real thoughts and advice in real time.
I've joked with friends its the "Farm to table" for thoughts, at least as much as it can be. Obviously you can just recite a LLM output, but that's more work IMO.
i think the point is good, hadwriting forces you to think more, even from typing the same.. BUT , i am unsure this would be proof you wrote it or AI genereated it , same with tatoos , AI can genereate picutres of said Tatoo...
This isn't about proof that you wrote it - it's about proof that you care. It was important enough that you spent the effort to write it out, or were so dedicated that you committed to wearing it on your body forever. It could be someone else's message, but you are proving it is important to you by showing a personal sacrifice to share the message.
While I appreciate the work put into this, I found it pretty hard to read because of the authors handwriting. I would never do this myself because I know that I have awful handwriting, and people would struggle to read it
My wife's mother tongue is a relatively niche language (I don't want to name it here) that hasn't been a priority for our big tech overlords. It's writing system isn't supported out-of-the-box by any platform, there's no machine translation or OCR, and no LLMs are able to produce it convincingly yet. People sometimes communicate by taking pictures of handwritten notes, or with voice messages.
I've long been frustrated by the lack of support, but within the last few months had a change of perspective. I realized that this is actually a blessing! This language is the only remaining text on the Internet that I read and am sure is not LLM generated. And when spoken, I believe much less infected by LLM-isms that English.
I've done some work building an OCR corpus, but actually stopped now and don't plan to complete it. Working OCR would unlock text that the AI labs would slurp up, train on, and improve their infinite slop generators. We don't need that.
Love how the handwriting changes and you can see the author get into flow. My reading sped up to match, like I was right with the author as they wrote. The whole thing was a beautifully connected, human experience. Bravo!
i just learned that these exist so you can like, prove that humanitarian funds that were supposed to fund surgery in civil war-torn Africa were actually used to perform surgery
that seems pretty ripe for a new Geldof / Bono combo to use thinking they are doing good
That was a fun read! I caught myself almost skimming the first part until i got to the mirrored paragraph, and slowed down significantly after that to read more deliberately.
I'm not sure how much actual advice one can take from this essay though beyond "use personal commitment (e.g. time or presence) to signal importance/care" and "go offline" (aka touch grass)
> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.
Generally speaking the ones that do care are those that also hope their own creations are/will be appreciated by people that similarly pour their heart into them, and they really don't understand that most people just see things for what they as consumers get out of them.
On some level writing on the net now is for an AI audience anyway. (Greetings fellow bots).
> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something.
That's fine, but I don't think the author would suggest writing e.g. library documentation by hand. It's clearly advice for the creator side of the problem of low signal-to-noise ratio in the digital space and how to stand out/signal, rather than a general rule
When the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, it wasn't used to produce finished documents. Printed books had large margins and omitted initial letters to leave space for the manual steps of rubrication and illumination. Plus, the printing itself was a product of huge amounts of manual typesetting effort.
The results speak for themselves. Those early printed works are beautiful to a degree few other books have managed since.
> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something.
The reverse: sometimes people care if you do. "Caring" and "effort" tend to be good indicators.
But imagine there's some yet-undiscovered <something> that has big implications, and conditions exist for its discovery. Then someone stumbles across it, puts out a hasty tweet, walks off & doesn't look back. Took no effort whatsoever, didn't care much about it. Or maybe some AI does that.
Would that reduce the value of the message? Imho: no.
I'm hoping we'll find ways to separate the gems from mountains of slop they're buried in, that don't require AI-powered tools to wade through that slop & pick the gems. Or establish incentives to not produce all that slop in the 1st place. Not sure if that's doable or how.
But I don't care that much about AI-generated or not (although I'd prefer if stuff were marked as such). Useful, well-written, interesting, exactly what you needed, providing a new angle on a subject, innovative: that's where it's at.
Btw I'm all out of soapboxes. Would a potato crate do, in a pinch? Not gettin' a tattoo!
LLM slop is considered low value because it contains a low information/minute as well as a low effort/minute signal. You want to know that the reader put more effort in than you do, and that it is worth your time. The effort signal just points to a possible high information/minute return.
When someone takes the laborious effort to provide a short paragraph on an insanely complex topic, precisely written without excessive hedging or jargon, and conveying a shortcut or mental model, I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable signal. No amount of fancy medium can top a well-framed idea concisely stated.
And also has the hallmarks of "art." I suggest, however, if one were to actually implement this, that the 'excrement' should likely be a food-safe lookalike; maybe chocolate with granola and fruit hunks. Less likely to have trouble with child welfare authorities.
What differentiates a splendid idea slopped into an article by AI from complete meaningless drivel being chiseled into perfection by a skilled human writer is not the form, but the content.
We arrived in the era of Effective Content: judge a book by its content, not its cover.
E=MC^2 expressed as AI slop article still is light-years ahead of any of, say, Deepak Chopra's work no matter how polished, well-thought or painstakingly handwritten it was.
If I had the algorithm for AGI and I would let Fable write some slop about it you'll still sell your own mother to read it. It's not the form, it's the content.
Because I can't read all content to judge its value.
I used to use other signals to help judge: literacy, reputation of the writer or publisher, the media they used to communicate. Now even governments are distributing notice of official policy through poorly written tweets, yet the Internet is flooded with whole websites of AI slop that looks on the surface to be professionally made. We lost the signals that used to help us filter out the signal from the noise.
The alternative is not to read all content carefully because we don't have anywhere near the bandwidth to do so. This article is about other ways we can provide those signals. Even if the content is crap, the fact that someone has to sacrifice to produce it limits the amount they can produce, requiring them to prioritize what they produce, and signaling that this was important enough to them that it was worth the sacrifice.
TLDR proof of care from the article: a low bandwidth process (e.g., from handwriting to tattooing it on your body) that you voluntarily put your words through to convey their level of personal importance.
Some of his examples were tongue in cheek. But even handwriting feels a little too laborious when what we lost that needs replacement is manual typing.
I love this problem and think it's super important. I've similarly noticed myself using a whiteboard to think critically for a while and then take a picture of the whiteboard as proof of deep thought, even if the next step is AI supplemented (a doc, a video, etc).
I've also started noticing people annotating a whole doc "written by humans" to try to convey effort and care. That's fine for some things but do that too often and a reader will be left with two thoughts:
1. Did they actually write this by hand? No way
2. Should they have written some of this with AI? Seems like a waste of time formatting some of this when they could've been spending their time thinking critically
Quite easy to rig up a machine to type on a keyboard. I guess you could require a video of it being typed.
Then, the typist could simply be typing in an AI generated piece of text.
The only solution is to trust the person who handed you the work to accurately tell you the author, and then trust the author to be telling you any attribution.
I personally have earned this trust as people know anything I AI generate will have an Assisted-by: tag on it.
Agree. OTOH, people have been using plotters for simulating handwriting. Also, nothing preventing someone from hand-copying an AI written piece as I'm sure lots kids are doing these days for take-home assignments.
Guard your mental resources. You always should have, but in the age of AI it is no longer optional.
Simple algorithm for not wasting your time:
1) By default nothing is valuable or worth your while
2) Aggressively hunt for signals indicating potential worth (ancient pedigree and/or critical acclaim being most valuable)
3) Choose maybe 10% of what survives for actual reading, scan some others and dump the rest
Oh, and let LLMs summarize near-zero information articles like this one.
There's a coming reckoning with how little effort actually matters in the grand scheme of things. If your job takes you 10 seconds or 10 minutes or 10 hours, you havent done a "better job". If someone sits and thinks for an hour about a subject or an AI gives the answer in <10 seconds it doesn't imply one outcome is better than the other.
At the end of the day your toil is roughly meaningless to those around you, they only truly care about the outcomes -- both material and emotional -- for themselves. What do I get and how did you make me feel seems to be the only currency between humans, maybe it wasn't always this way but it sure seems to be near universal now.
Edit: also the how this was made was really quite clever :)
I didn't finish the article, it was slightly difficult to read due to handwriting, and I'm not sure if I would have gotten any more value if I had continued. The mere of act of having written, or prompted to get something written is not intrinsically valuable to me. I have a degree in English literature, and I do not feel confident in my ability to discern AI writing from human anymore. I wasn't sure when I stopped reading if the images had been generated or not, and I don't know if it matters either way.
If you cannot demonstrate why I should continue reading by the quality of your writing alone, I'm not going to finish what you have written. I put down maybe half of the books I start without finishing, plenty of them written well before 2022 just because I am not enjoying them, or find the writing bad, or boring, or overly pedantic, or a million other reasons that are specific to me and my own bad taste.
I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof. Writing is either useful or not useful, good or bad for the reader, and making the reading experience worse to prove your worthiness as a writer provides me no value. If you need to be reassured that something was not written by a large language model, and that's enough for you to consider something worth reading your standards are lower than I will ever be comfortable dropping mine too.
I think that perhaps you would have gotten more out of finishing it - given that you would have found out that it is more of a short story than an "article."
> I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof.
The problem, at least for me, is that I don't trust AI. Subtle mistakes, outright hallucinations, or mistakes/omissions that an actual expert of the domain would immediately notice, whatever.
And as soon as I encounter anything that even looks like one of the typical AI tells or, in long content, a lack of cohesion or repetition... I can't help myself from immediately second-guessing every little thing in the content. And where there's smoke, usually there is fire... and I find myself annoyed for having wasted time to read something I had to crosscheck with other sources and found my suspicions confirmed. At least sometimes I learn something from digging into original sources, but frankly, I don't have the time for that.
Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.
Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?
Of all the reasons to dislike AI writing, this is an odd one.
> Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.
I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder. And I say that with all seriousness.
> obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder
I disagree and think this is an overly extreme take.
I will agree that the trust/correctness thing is kind of silly because humans can be and are often wrong just as much.
But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output. Maybe LLM output is OK at work. I honestly don't care if its used for corporate bureaucracy stuff I probably wasn't actually reading it anyway outside of skimming it or putting into an LLM to summarize for me.
But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection. We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.
Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.
So I don't think its unreasonable at all to be immediately dismissive of anything that is pure LLM output. The actual content itself is only one half of the equation.
> But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output.
You mean there's a human creative element that is lost. LLMs are creative just as humans are. I had an LLM write something fairly creative, and people on HN loved it (I think it was clear that it was LLM generated).
I had an LLM write a song about a piece of technology, and one of the key folks behind the technology loved it, and reached out to me to get permission to play it in the next conference about that technology.[1]
Normal people can appreciate LLM creativity. That's why I mentioned disorders.
> But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection.
As Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crap". He had it wrong - the percentage is much higher. Most of the human generated stuff in the categories you listed above are crap. Why put the spotlight on LLMs when they also produce crap?
> We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.
You are blindly looking at only one facet of human communication. Much of human communication is also misunderstood, miscommunicated, and breaks those empathetic connections and cause social problems. And I'm not talking about bad human actors, but ordinary folks who, in their attempts to create connection, make things unwittingly go in the opposite direction. These are not exceptional situations - you'd see plenty of it in any large HN thread in the pre-LLM days.
Let's not romanticize human communications of yore by remembering only the (rare) positive examples.
> Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.
You state mere opinion as fact, and feel comfort by surrounding yourself with those who think likewise (much of the HN crowd). It is not grounded on anything.
If Jill used an LLM to state what she intended, and it did it in a way she approved, and Jack can't connect with the person because an LLM was at play, the problem is not with the LLM or the Jill. She is trying to connect, and may well be doing it in a more effective manner than she would have without.
Just as when writing something important, where strong emotions can get involved, we share a draft with someone to get feedback, people will share it with an LLM to get feedback. Yet people like the OP will criticize them for doing so (the part I quoted in my comment).
At the end of the day, if Jill got an LLM to help with her writing, and confirmed that the final text reflects what she intended, and Jack says he can't trust any of it because an LLM touched it, then Jack is clearly signaling a lack of respect for Jill. She put in the effort to communicate, put in effort to proofread/edit, and Jack has labeled her and moved on.
If Jack doesn't trust Jill to use an LLM appropriately, then Jack shouldn't bother reading anything Jill writes. The presence of an LLM is a red herring.
[1] Silly in retrospect. I didn't create it - why should I be the one giving permission?
AI text is just a quick heuristic for garbage. But I’ve always disliked garbage. Even when it came dressed like:
How to use Monads
When David James was a young child, his mother used to tell him that you could oil vegetables before putting them in the pan. On the ranch in Eastern Kentucky David’s mornings would be spent watering, caring for the cows, and then playing with the dogs. Before he started blah blah blah…
<500 words later> and then he defined a structure called a monad with three properties…
Dude, it’s just a class of this filler text for people whose success criteria is lines of code. At least previously the filler was somewhat skippable. Now it’s interspersed with the useful parts.
But that’s fine: it’s a solved problem by just making a machine extract information. So yes, complaining about the form is passé. I’m going to put it in the ore refiner anyway and the slag goes in the pit. Away to the slag pit with David’s infernal mother.
> Dude, it’s just a class of this filler text for people whose success criteria is lines of code. At least previously the filler was somewhat skippable.
That is a different problem though. SEO optimization, the bane of modern human existence...
> Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?
With a human, I can at least have implicit trust based on credentials - e.g. a medical doctor, a scientist or a well-known programmer. Basically, if Raymond Chen writes a blog post detailing how Windows 95 recognized software installers to ward off unwanted modifications to files [1], I'll 100% trust what he writes to be true. But if it's some random blogger, the text reeking of LLM tells, who posts no sources, nothing I can (easily) cross-check? Off to the bin it goes, or if it's something that might actually be useful for me to know being true, I'll go and research it.
Or there's other trust cues for content. A respected academic magazine ranks higher than a "layman's magazine" which ranks higher than a well-respected newspaper which ranks higher than a tabloid which ranks higher than yellow-press which ranks higher than "j0ey r4nd0m" (without bluecheck) on Twitter which ranks higher than "j0ey r4nd0m" (with bluecheck) on Twitter.
It used to be the other way around with Twitter, but nowadays, the bluecheck is mostly used by garbage LLM bots farming views for monetization.
(Side note: the fact that AI training cannot do this kind of "implicit trust" accounting at all and just blindly ingests everything in the corpus into its weights is a huge issue!)
> I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder.
I'd rather say in a few years people who get caught using AI get lynchmob'd. The resistance, particularly among the artist, environmental and worker rights groups, is fierce and it's only increasing with all the negative impacts of AI.
> Basically, if Raymond Chen writes a blog post detailing how Windows 95 recognized software installers to ward off unwanted modifications to files [1], I'll 100% trust what he writes to be true.
OK, now what if tomorrow Raymond Chen writes a blog post that was partially or wholly authored by an LLM. Would you trust it as much as one entirely written by Raymond? Why or why not?
Yeah and if this were taken seriously, you would have Mechanical Turk style services where poors are paid pennies to hand-write submitted/generated slop, defeating the purpose.
They covered that situation with the pen plotter. There are signals of commitment that you can't fake. The article isn't saying anything about accuracy or authorship, only that you actually cared about what you were communicating enough to put in some self sacrifice, and that this is a useful signal to help decide if something is worth listening to.
I have to admit I skipped to the end, but the conclusion of the article seems to be: "If you really care about something, make a song and dance about it. Around a bonfire. While wearing feathers and a mask. Drugs are optional, but recommended."?
...which reminded me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyk5U2p-msk ("I must be a narcissist / God knows that I can’t resist / To make a song and dance about it").
When I know something is (primarily) AI generated, I lose interest.
The exception is when it's about a niche I care about, e.g. an analysis of opening trends of early world chess champions. I'll read AI on that for an hour.
My sense is that, for most writing, it's fundamentally interpersonal, the information is about the author as much as it is about the world.
Maybe this flood of slop will cause people to care more about the substance of the writing, not the perspectives of the writing.
Not surprised to see such negative comments, this forum is fried by LLMs nowadays.
I was immediately intrigued by reading a handwritten blog post, and enjoy ergodic literature, like this! I liked the message too, and this might shove me toward some handwriting projects I've been meaning to tackle lately.
What an interesting word, "ergodic". Searching for its meaning led me to some curious corner of mathematics and physics. Then I found this definition:
> Ergodic literature is a mode of textual organization in which nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text, beyond ordinary eye movement or turning pages.
The specific use of the term comes from:
Aarseth, Espen J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
Fascinating, it's like an aesthetic choice of medium or form of representation, expanding what text or literature is capable of.
(By the way, is your user name a joke on "sparky", the slang word for an electrician?)
There's a few books that are coupled with the term ergodic literature, chief among them House of Leaves. It really is a thoroughly enjoyable exercise to read that book, I highly recommend.
> (By the way, is your user name a joke on "sparky", the slang word for an electrician?)
It wasn't originally when I used it as a kid, but I grew in to that term later :)
LLM corporate slop is the new version big data reports that nobody reads.
I am sad this infected code documentation and PR descriptions. This kind of stuff used to exist in order keep managers/executives busy not to keep engineers busy...
tangent rant, annoys me like "yeah senior engineer" or whatever, "yeah I can do that", puts the task into AI, puts up a dogshit PR can't explain how it works
You don't need all this. All you need is to simply explain what purpose the tech serves and explain how it solves that problem. And then compete in a fair market with other makers trying to solve the same problem. All tech slop fails at one of these three things, the vast majority all three.
If you want to stop the dysfunction become involved in your government and get stronger antitrust legislation passed. OR you could write everything by hand, take pictures and pretend image models don't exist.
When you receive a handwritten letter addressed to you, you get a feeling that a sender cares. When you read such a blog post, you get a feeling that the author has nothing better to do.
But what a great idea nevertheless - proof of care! Instead of checking if you are human and not a malicious bot, they shoud require a proof that you do care about what you are going to access. Like - I don't know - write by hand on the screen a short essay on how accessing the site will make you happy.
EDIT: Or - better yet - make a tattoo with an URL of the site you want to access, and then upload a selfie.
I'm not a grifter and am not looking to use this for anything myself, but I just found myself nerdsniped to get Codex to reproduce this, and had it also write it up as a skill - https://droptext.cc/9jfbn
Handwriting is inherently ableist. A portion of the population is blessed with the inherent ability of fast, legible handwriting. A portion of the population is not. Typing is an equalizer that allows more people to participate in the conversation.
I hope you're joking. In case you're serious, the same argument could be made about typing, speaking, or really any related activity. Or communication in general.
If this were the only option, sure. It's not - the article points out several other possibilities. Just because one option isn't accessible to all doesn't mean we have to accuse the author of being ableist. We don't take away writing from some people because others can't do it - we provide alternatives.
This was something that bugged me while writing. Someone even asked, What's the point if people aren't going to read the whole thing? Reading this made my day, not just because of the content, but because someone else cared enough to tackle the same problem. Good one, Sire.
I'm glad it hit the spot. There is a piece by Christian Miles that got me thinking in this direction, which you might enjoy: https://ammil.industries/i-know-you-didnt-write-this/
If I had handwritten this, there would be at least one (likely lots more) errors in writing crossed out mingled in with the text. That there isn't makes me wonder why such a lengthy sample contains seemingly zero handwriting errors. Is that plausible?
EDIT: After seeing the comments, I am realizing how little I ever rewrote my own writings, an admitted weakness of mine. It was the blindspot behind which I made my reply!
You can handwrite more than just your first draft. It was common before the proliferation of computers to handwrite early drafts in pencil, and then handwrite the final manuscript with ink.
> It was common before the proliferation of computers
We always had to write our first couple drafts in pencil/handwritten in school. Eventually we moved to typing the final draft by the time I hit high school but exams were always handwritten still and now I feel quite "old" at 38 knowing that there are adults on this very forum that probably did not have to handwrite much beyond elementary school.
Yes, your bias is showing. Before Gutenberg, "scribe" was a profession, and perfect fidelity was expected.
We also don't know how many sheets went in the bin.
You can write a draft first and then transcribe it once it's done without any mistakes. That's how I had to write essays when I was at school.
In grammar school in the 90s, I used to write in pencil, then retrace in pen when done, erasing the underlying pencil after the ink dried. I'd proofread the pencil version, find missing words, and you could rewrite to balance out space
I think that was pretty common amongst "keeners" doing writing assignments.
this is easier to read: https://nonogra.ph/proof-of-care-in-the-age-of-ai-07-14-2026
I am commenting only to say that I read the reflected-letter text and found that amusing.
I don't know if it's universal, but your non-dominant hand may form reflected letters delightfully easily if you air-write simultaneously with your dominant hand.
I've sort of been thinking about this in terms of software dev lifecycle & PRs/code review.
Maybe PRs these days need to "test" the human? "Explain how this code works, without AI, or it gets rejected."
I'm unreasonably distracted by the fact that the illustrations of the tattoos are on the back of the "Subtraction" page.
That is consistent for both pages, but inconsistent with how they seem to be ordered within the text.
I guess the chapters were re-arranged post-script, with the "Storytellers" chapter inserted between them later?
Ooh, sharp eye ;-) You are correct.
Typewriters work too. I’m toying with the idea of starting an online journal that only accepts submissions written by hand or by mechanical typewriters.
I've been debating switching my blog to a vlog that is a one shot recording, no retakes, just real thoughts and advice in real time.
I've joked with friends its the "Farm to table" for thoughts, at least as much as it can be. Obviously you can just recite a LLM output, but that's more work IMO.
There's honestly something to this [0]… you should do it!
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexanderTheCreate
Proving care still leaves the audience to determine if the care is in the message or in attracting attention.
I was genuinely expecting this to be LLM-generated.
Also, what’s his problem with the “Witch Priestess from the North?”
EDIT: Oh, the blue backgrounds are links. https://jacobfilipp.com/new-lord/
> I was genuinely expecting this to be LLM-generated.
It isn’t?
>Click here to see the "how this was made" feature
^ at the bottom of the article
I actually saw that after I finished reading through. Then I thought:
That's exactly what an LLM would want you think. (this is a weak joke) It's a good article.
i think the point is good, hadwriting forces you to think more, even from typing the same.. BUT , i am unsure this would be proof you wrote it or AI genereated it , same with tatoos , AI can genereate picutres of said Tatoo...
Even though it doesn't prove the author wrote it himself, it at least proves he had to thoroughly read it before sharing.
This isn't about proof that you wrote it - it's about proof that you care. It was important enough that you spent the effort to write it out, or were so dedicated that you committed to wearing it on your body forever. It could be someone else's message, but you are proving it is important to you by showing a personal sacrifice to share the message.
While I appreciate the work put into this, I found it pretty hard to read because of the authors handwriting. I would never do this myself because I know that I have awful handwriting, and people would struggle to read it
Scroll to the end, text is intentionally copy-pasteable. Press ctrl+a and read it in Comic Sans :).
archived, easier to read: https://nonogra.ph/proof-of-care-in-the-age-of-ai-07-14-2026
This misses the point.
People with visual impairments and other functional limitations don't deserve nice things apparently, like dignity online.
The article misses the point of writing.
My wife's mother tongue is a relatively niche language (I don't want to name it here) that hasn't been a priority for our big tech overlords. It's writing system isn't supported out-of-the-box by any platform, there's no machine translation or OCR, and no LLMs are able to produce it convincingly yet. People sometimes communicate by taking pictures of handwritten notes, or with voice messages.
I've long been frustrated by the lack of support, but within the last few months had a change of perspective. I realized that this is actually a blessing! This language is the only remaining text on the Internet that I read and am sure is not LLM generated. And when spoken, I believe much less infected by LLM-isms that English.
I've done some work building an OCR corpus, but actually stopped now and don't plan to complete it. Working OCR would unlock text that the AI labs would slurp up, train on, and improve their infinite slop generators. We don't need that.
In the cyber bowels of Neo Tokyo, there is only one rule: real hackers speak Navajo
Oh god he misspelled "alright".
Right at the end too. Shame.
Better write it out again...
Love how the handwriting changes and you can see the author get into flow. My reading sped up to match, like I was right with the author as they wrote. The whole thing was a beautifully connected, human experience. Bravo!
We need a proof-of-care coin.
i just learned that these exist so you can like, prove that humanitarian funds that were supposed to fund surgery in civil war-torn Africa were actually used to perform surgery
that seems pretty ripe for a new Geldof / Bono combo to use thinking they are doing good
That was a fun read! I caught myself almost skimming the first part until i got to the mirrored paragraph, and slowed down significantly after that to read more deliberately.
I'm not sure how much actual advice one can take from this essay though beyond "use personal commitment (e.g. time or presence) to signal importance/care" and "go offline" (aka touch grass)
Don't handwrite your next post and definitely don't start writing in your own back to front cryptic code.
The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.
It's like lamented handwritten script when the printing press was invented....
> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.
Generally speaking the ones that do care are those that also hope their own creations are/will be appreciated by people that similarly pour their heart into them, and they really don't understand that most people just see things for what they as consumers get out of them.
On some level writing on the net now is for an AI audience anyway. (Greetings fellow bots).
> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something.
That's fine, but I don't think the author would suggest writing e.g. library documentation by hand. It's clearly advice for the creator side of the problem of low signal-to-noise ratio in the digital space and how to stand out/signal, rather than a general rule
When the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, it wasn't used to produce finished documents. Printed books had large margins and omitted initial letters to leave space for the manual steps of rubrication and illumination. Plus, the printing itself was a product of huge amounts of manual typesetting effort.
The results speak for themselves. Those early printed works are beautiful to a degree few other books have managed since.
> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something.
The reverse: sometimes people care if you do. "Caring" and "effort" tend to be good indicators.
But imagine there's some yet-undiscovered <something> that has big implications, and conditions exist for its discovery. Then someone stumbles across it, puts out a hasty tweet, walks off & doesn't look back. Took no effort whatsoever, didn't care much about it. Or maybe some AI does that.
Would that reduce the value of the message? Imho: no.
I'm hoping we'll find ways to separate the gems from mountains of slop they're buried in, that don't require AI-powered tools to wade through that slop & pick the gems. Or establish incentives to not produce all that slop in the 1st place. Not sure if that's doable or how.
But I don't care that much about AI-generated or not (although I'd prefer if stuff were marked as such). Useful, well-written, interesting, exactly what you needed, providing a new angle on a subject, innovative: that's where it's at.
Btw I'm all out of soapboxes. Would a potato crate do, in a pinch? Not gettin' a tattoo!
LLM slop is considered low value because it contains a low information/minute as well as a low effort/minute signal. You want to know that the reader put more effort in than you do, and that it is worth your time. The effort signal just points to a possible high information/minute return.
When someone takes the laborious effort to provide a short paragraph on an insanely complex topic, precisely written without excessive hedging or jargon, and conveying a shortcut or mental model, I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable signal. No amount of fancy medium can top a well-framed idea concisely stated.
> I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable sign
An infant scrawling the alphabet in its own excrement would have that "signal"...
And also has the hallmarks of "art." I suggest, however, if one were to actually implement this, that the 'excrement' should likely be a food-safe lookalike; maybe chocolate with granola and fruit hunks. Less likely to have trouble with child welfare authorities.
Just a short jump from there to the concept of steganography over the back channel of aggregate child welfare enforcement actions. Typical HN
You can probably get VC money for that
What differentiates a splendid idea slopped into an article by AI from complete meaningless drivel being chiseled into perfection by a skilled human writer is not the form, but the content.
We arrived in the era of Effective Content: judge a book by its content, not its cover.
E=MC^2 expressed as AI slop article still is light-years ahead of any of, say, Deepak Chopra's work no matter how polished, well-thought or painstakingly handwritten it was.
If I had the algorithm for AGI and I would let Fable write some slop about it you'll still sell your own mother to read it. It's not the form, it's the content.
Because I can't read all content to judge its value.
I used to use other signals to help judge: literacy, reputation of the writer or publisher, the media they used to communicate. Now even governments are distributing notice of official policy through poorly written tweets, yet the Internet is flooded with whole websites of AI slop that looks on the surface to be professionally made. We lost the signals that used to help us filter out the signal from the noise.
The alternative is not to read all content carefully because we don't have anywhere near the bandwidth to do so. This article is about other ways we can provide those signals. Even if the content is crap, the fact that someone has to sacrifice to produce it limits the amount they can produce, requiring them to prioritize what they produce, and signaling that this was important enough to them that it was worth the sacrifice.
TLDR proof of care from the article: a low bandwidth process (e.g., from handwriting to tattooing it on your body) that you voluntarily put your words through to convey their level of personal importance.
Some of his examples were tongue in cheek. But even handwriting feels a little too laborious when what we lost that needs replacement is manual typing.
Not to mention accessibility, which as usual benefits everyone with features such as text search, so I guess we‘ll keep looking for an answer.
Typewriters?
I have heard of some high school classes reverting to typewriters. So your suggestion holds some weight.
I love this problem and think it's super important. I've similarly noticed myself using a whiteboard to think critically for a while and then take a picture of the whiteboard as proof of deep thought, even if the next step is AI supplemented (a doc, a video, etc).
I've also started noticing people annotating a whole doc "written by humans" to try to convey effort and care. That's fine for some things but do that too often and a reader will be left with two thoughts:
1. Did they actually write this by hand? No way 2. Should they have written some of this with AI? Seems like a waste of time formatting some of this when they could've been spending their time thinking critically
What do you mean "no way"? We've written long texts for as long as we've been writing as a species.
Not GP, but consider the view from the inside of a feckless pleb's skull. Effort is to be avoided, so its needless expenditure is unrelatable.
it's not that it's completely unbelievable, but I could see people having doubts considering:
1. AI exists and is widely used 2. A person only has so much bandwidth. If they put out 10 docs in a day, did they really hand write them all?
I've been thinking about something similar for a while now. Although my scheme involves cryptographic attestation and typing stuff with hands.
Quite easy to rig up a machine to type on a keyboard. I guess you could require a video of it being typed.
Then, the typist could simply be typing in an AI generated piece of text.
The only solution is to trust the person who handed you the work to accurately tell you the author, and then trust the author to be telling you any attribution.
I personally have earned this trust as people know anything I AI generate will have an Assisted-by: tag on it.
Agree. OTOH, people have been using plotters for simulating handwriting. Also, nothing preventing someone from hand-copying an AI written piece as I'm sure lots kids are doing these days for take-home assignments.
Guard your mental resources. You always should have, but in the age of AI it is no longer optional.
Simple algorithm for not wasting your time:
1) By default nothing is valuable or worth your while 2) Aggressively hunt for signals indicating potential worth (ancient pedigree and/or critical acclaim being most valuable) 3) Choose maybe 10% of what survives for actual reading, scan some others and dump the rest
Oh, and let LLMs summarize near-zero information articles like this one.
This sounds like work for a personally aligned local agent interacting with your past and future media timeline.
It probably exists in some form, any suggestions?
> This sounds like work for a personally aligned local agent interacting with your past and future media timeline.
I have one of those. It's me. I'm my personally aligned local agent.
You can be yours too, as long as the atrophy hasn't set in yet.
There is plenty of info here. That you failed to notice it is a separate issue.
Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crud) applies more than ever in the age of AI.
The best filter is time -- the cream does eventually rise to the top. And conveniently the time filter also excludes AI slop.
There's a coming reckoning with how little effort actually matters in the grand scheme of things. If your job takes you 10 seconds or 10 minutes or 10 hours, you havent done a "better job". If someone sits and thinks for an hour about a subject or an AI gives the answer in <10 seconds it doesn't imply one outcome is better than the other.
At the end of the day your toil is roughly meaningless to those around you, they only truly care about the outcomes -- both material and emotional -- for themselves. What do I get and how did you make me feel seems to be the only currency between humans, maybe it wasn't always this way but it sure seems to be near universal now.
Edit: also the how this was made was really quite clever :)
I didn't finish the article, it was slightly difficult to read due to handwriting, and I'm not sure if I would have gotten any more value if I had continued. The mere of act of having written, or prompted to get something written is not intrinsically valuable to me. I have a degree in English literature, and I do not feel confident in my ability to discern AI writing from human anymore. I wasn't sure when I stopped reading if the images had been generated or not, and I don't know if it matters either way.
If you cannot demonstrate why I should continue reading by the quality of your writing alone, I'm not going to finish what you have written. I put down maybe half of the books I start without finishing, plenty of them written well before 2022 just because I am not enjoying them, or find the writing bad, or boring, or overly pedantic, or a million other reasons that are specific to me and my own bad taste.
I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof. Writing is either useful or not useful, good or bad for the reader, and making the reading experience worse to prove your worthiness as a writer provides me no value. If you need to be reassured that something was not written by a large language model, and that's enough for you to consider something worth reading your standards are lower than I will ever be comfortable dropping mine too.
I think that perhaps you would have gotten more out of finishing it - given that you would have found out that it is more of a short story than an "article."
Yes, but not a particularly good story.
> I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof.
The problem, at least for me, is that I don't trust AI. Subtle mistakes, outright hallucinations, or mistakes/omissions that an actual expert of the domain would immediately notice, whatever.
And as soon as I encounter anything that even looks like one of the typical AI tells or, in long content, a lack of cohesion or repetition... I can't help myself from immediately second-guessing every little thing in the content. And where there's smoke, usually there is fire... and I find myself annoyed for having wasted time to read something I had to crosscheck with other sources and found my suspicions confirmed. At least sometimes I learn something from digging into original sources, but frankly, I don't have the time for that.
Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.
Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?
Of all the reasons to dislike AI writing, this is an odd one.
> Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.
I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder. And I say that with all seriousness.
> obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder
I disagree and think this is an overly extreme take.
I will agree that the trust/correctness thing is kind of silly because humans can be and are often wrong just as much.
But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output. Maybe LLM output is OK at work. I honestly don't care if its used for corporate bureaucracy stuff I probably wasn't actually reading it anyway outside of skimming it or putting into an LLM to summarize for me.
But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection. We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.
Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.
So I don't think its unreasonable at all to be immediately dismissive of anything that is pure LLM output. The actual content itself is only one half of the equation.
> But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output.
You mean there's a human creative element that is lost. LLMs are creative just as humans are. I had an LLM write something fairly creative, and people on HN loved it (I think it was clear that it was LLM generated).
I had an LLM write a song about a piece of technology, and one of the key folks behind the technology loved it, and reached out to me to get permission to play it in the next conference about that technology.[1]
Normal people can appreciate LLM creativity. That's why I mentioned disorders.
> But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection.
As Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crap". He had it wrong - the percentage is much higher. Most of the human generated stuff in the categories you listed above are crap. Why put the spotlight on LLMs when they also produce crap?
> We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.
You are blindly looking at only one facet of human communication. Much of human communication is also misunderstood, miscommunicated, and breaks those empathetic connections and cause social problems. And I'm not talking about bad human actors, but ordinary folks who, in their attempts to create connection, make things unwittingly go in the opposite direction. These are not exceptional situations - you'd see plenty of it in any large HN thread in the pre-LLM days.
Let's not romanticize human communications of yore by remembering only the (rare) positive examples.
> Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.
You state mere opinion as fact, and feel comfort by surrounding yourself with those who think likewise (much of the HN crowd). It is not grounded on anything.
If Jill used an LLM to state what she intended, and it did it in a way she approved, and Jack can't connect with the person because an LLM was at play, the problem is not with the LLM or the Jill. She is trying to connect, and may well be doing it in a more effective manner than she would have without.
Just as when writing something important, where strong emotions can get involved, we share a draft with someone to get feedback, people will share it with an LLM to get feedback. Yet people like the OP will criticize them for doing so (the part I quoted in my comment).
At the end of the day, if Jill got an LLM to help with her writing, and confirmed that the final text reflects what she intended, and Jack says he can't trust any of it because an LLM touched it, then Jack is clearly signaling a lack of respect for Jill. She put in the effort to communicate, put in effort to proofread/edit, and Jack has labeled her and moved on.
If Jack doesn't trust Jill to use an LLM appropriately, then Jack shouldn't bother reading anything Jill writes. The presence of an LLM is a red herring.
[1] Silly in retrospect. I didn't create it - why should I be the one giving permission?
AI text is just a quick heuristic for garbage. But I’ve always disliked garbage. Even when it came dressed like:
How to use Monads
When David James was a young child, his mother used to tell him that you could oil vegetables before putting them in the pan. On the ranch in Eastern Kentucky David’s mornings would be spent watering, caring for the cows, and then playing with the dogs. Before he started blah blah blah…
<500 words later> and then he defined a structure called a monad with three properties…
Dude, it’s just a class of this filler text for people whose success criteria is lines of code. At least previously the filler was somewhat skippable. Now it’s interspersed with the useful parts.
But that’s fine: it’s a solved problem by just making a machine extract information. So yes, complaining about the form is passé. I’m going to put it in the ore refiner anyway and the slag goes in the pit. Away to the slag pit with David’s infernal mother.
> AI text is just a quick heuristic for garbage.
Thank you for being honest, and saying that the problem is not with the other party, but with your lack of resources/time to read and judge.
And, BTW, just replace "AI" in your sentence with "Human", and the statement would still be true!
The entire point was that replacing AI with Human makes the statement true... Garbage is garbage.
> The entire point was that replacing AI with Human makes the statement true
That point is under contention.
> Dude, it’s just a class of this filler text for people whose success criteria is lines of code. At least previously the filler was somewhat skippable.
That is a different problem though. SEO optimization, the bane of modern human existence...
> Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?
With a human, I can at least have implicit trust based on credentials - e.g. a medical doctor, a scientist or a well-known programmer. Basically, if Raymond Chen writes a blog post detailing how Windows 95 recognized software installers to ward off unwanted modifications to files [1], I'll 100% trust what he writes to be true. But if it's some random blogger, the text reeking of LLM tells, who posts no sources, nothing I can (easily) cross-check? Off to the bin it goes, or if it's something that might actually be useful for me to know being true, I'll go and research it.
Or there's other trust cues for content. A respected academic magazine ranks higher than a "layman's magazine" which ranks higher than a well-respected newspaper which ranks higher than a tabloid which ranks higher than yellow-press which ranks higher than "j0ey r4nd0m" (without bluecheck) on Twitter which ranks higher than "j0ey r4nd0m" (with bluecheck) on Twitter.
It used to be the other way around with Twitter, but nowadays, the bluecheck is mostly used by garbage LLM bots farming views for monetization.
(Side note: the fact that AI training cannot do this kind of "implicit trust" accounting at all and just blindly ingests everything in the corpus into its weights is a huge issue!)
> I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder.
I'd rather say in a few years people who get caught using AI get lynchmob'd. The resistance, particularly among the artist, environmental and worker rights groups, is fierce and it's only increasing with all the negative impacts of AI.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260707-00/?p=11...
> Basically, if Raymond Chen writes a blog post detailing how Windows 95 recognized software installers to ward off unwanted modifications to files [1], I'll 100% trust what he writes to be true.
OK, now what if tomorrow Raymond Chen writes a blog post that was partially or wholly authored by an LLM. Would you trust it as much as one entirely written by Raymond? Why or why not?
It's not that hard for AI to generate images of handwriting.
A long handwritten essay used to at least prove someone spent time on it.
Am I the only one who thinks the ending is a non-sequitur? How is the hackneyed, "the kids are allright" [sic] related to the preceding content?
Yeah and if this were taken seriously, you would have Mechanical Turk style services where poors are paid pennies to hand-write submitted/generated slop, defeating the purpose.
They covered that situation with the pen plotter. There are signals of commitment that you can't fake. The article isn't saying anything about accuracy or authorship, only that you actually cared about what you were communicating enough to put in some self sacrifice, and that this is a useful signal to help decide if something is worth listening to.
I think most people wouldn't appreciate it these days :(
I have to admit I skipped to the end, but the conclusion of the article seems to be: "If you really care about something, make a song and dance about it. Around a bonfire. While wearing feathers and a mask. Drugs are optional, but recommended."?
...which reminded me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyk5U2p-msk ("I must be a narcissist / God knows that I can’t resist / To make a song and dance about it").
I can honestly say I've never seen a young man with "GRIND HARD" tattooed across his forehead.
When I know something is (primarily) AI generated, I lose interest.
The exception is when it's about a niche I care about, e.g. an analysis of opening trends of early world chess champions. I'll read AI on that for an hour.
My sense is that, for most writing, it's fundamentally interpersonal, the information is about the author as much as it is about the world.
Maybe this flood of slop will cause people to care more about the substance of the writing, not the perspectives of the writing.
Text to handwriting in 3..2..
I feel like perhaps you did not read the whole piece
You got me.
Not surprised to see such negative comments, this forum is fried by LLMs nowadays. I was immediately intrigued by reading a handwritten blog post, and enjoy ergodic literature, like this! I liked the message too, and this might shove me toward some handwriting projects I've been meaning to tackle lately.
What an interesting word, "ergodic". Searching for its meaning led me to some curious corner of mathematics and physics. Then I found this definition:
> Ergodic literature is a mode of textual organization in which nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text, beyond ordinary eye movement or turning pages.
The specific use of the term comes from:
Fascinating, it's like an aesthetic choice of medium or form of representation, expanding what text or literature is capable of.(By the way, is your user name a joke on "sparky", the slang word for an electrician?)
There's a few books that are coupled with the term ergodic literature, chief among them House of Leaves. It really is a thoroughly enjoyable exercise to read that book, I highly recommend.
> (By the way, is your user name a joke on "sparky", the slang word for an electrician?)
It wasn't originally when I used it as a kid, but I grew in to that term later :)
Wonderful, I read a little about House of Leaves, and am intrigued. What a great way to have a book recommended, looking forward to reading it. :)
LLM corporate slop is the new version big data reports that nobody reads.
I am sad this infected code documentation and PR descriptions. This kind of stuff used to exist in order keep managers/executives busy not to keep engineers busy...
Except that AI can generate hand-written text too, so that will not necessarily server as proof either
tangent rant, annoys me like "yeah senior engineer" or whatever, "yeah I can do that", puts the task into AI, puts up a dogshit PR can't explain how it works
now more than ever can fake it
What do you mean the RAM goes brrr and the CPU goes tick tock and things just happen.
We need to normalize provenance tracking and sharing, similar to how git lets you separate the author from the committer.
I would go further and quantify how much of the message is AI in situations where humans edit it.
The medium is the message! Well written.
Sorry, I couldn't resist and just got Codex to replicate this for me as an OCR-d page on top of an AI-generated image - https://jsfiddle.net/wmLvojr7/
You don't need all this. All you need is to simply explain what purpose the tech serves and explain how it solves that problem. And then compete in a fair market with other makers trying to solve the same problem. All tech slop fails at one of these three things, the vast majority all three.
If you want to stop the dysfunction become involved in your government and get stronger antitrust legislation passed. OR you could write everything by hand, take pictures and pretend image models don't exist.
When you receive a handwritten letter addressed to you, you get a feeling that a sender cares. When you read such a blog post, you get a feeling that the author has nothing better to do.
But what a great idea nevertheless - proof of care! Instead of checking if you are human and not a malicious bot, they shoud require a proof that you do care about what you are going to access. Like - I don't know - write by hand on the screen a short essay on how accessing the site will make you happy.
EDIT: Or - better yet - make a tattoo with an URL of the site you want to access, and then upload a selfie.
I'm 100% sure an AI grifter will see this and start creating blogposts with AI-generated images of handwritten text.
I'm not a grifter and am not looking to use this for anything myself, but I just found myself nerdsniped to get Codex to reproduce this, and had it also write it up as a skill - https://droptext.cc/9jfbn
Handwriting is inherently ableist. A portion of the population is blessed with the inherent ability of fast, legible handwriting. A portion of the population is not. Typing is an equalizer that allows more people to participate in the conversation.
I hope you're joking. In case you're serious, the same argument could be made about typing, speaking, or really any related activity. Or communication in general.
If this were the only option, sure. It's not - the article points out several other possibilities. Just because one option isn't accessible to all doesn't mean we have to accuse the author of being ableist. We don't take away writing from some people because others can't do it - we provide alternatives.