I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
A writer discusses the difficulty of proving human authorship in the age of generative AI, proposing the use of version control systems like GitHub to track writing progress. The author argues that granular commit history serves as a 'receipt' to distinguish human creative effort from AI-generated content.
Why it matters
As AI-generated content proliferates, creators are seeking new methods to verify authenticity and protect their intellectual property from being dismissed as machine-made.
As I've mentioned before , we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created.
Sit with that for a second, because it's genuinely deranged. I have been writing fiction since 2014 — unpublished, because getting published is the hard part and I am bad at the hard part — and the thing that keeps me up at night isn't the rejection. It's that some stranger is going to read my perfectly normal writing tics, feel that they're AI, and torpedo the whole dream over a vibe.
The part that makes me want to chew glass is that none of this would be a problem if people were just honest about what they used to make a thing. But that's apparently too much to ask, because cheaters gonna cheat.
So instead, the rest of us have to carry receipts.
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