Essay · Apr. 21, 2026
Heat Signature aspires to give authors credit for the struggle of writing, not add to it. To that end, we’ve designed the service from the ground up to be anonymous, silent and transparent in its conclusions. The full privacy policy has the nitty gritty, but here are the broad strokes of how we stay out of the way:
Essay · Apr. 20, 2026
Who or what wrote these words? These past three years, generative AI has surpassed our ability to guess with any confidence. The models are so good at imitating humans that they often can fool a fellow machine trained to detect them. There’s nothing uncanny about it.
Whenever you write something in Google Docs, the platform records your keystrokes in small batches and saves them for the lifetime of the document. This allows Heat Signature to work retroactively on something you’ve already written.
When you submit a document, the Chrome extension (on your local machine) retrieves that data and scrubs the letters before sending it anonymously to the Heat Signature servers.
Our model uses a combination of simple heuristics (was the text pasted all at once?) and advanced machine learning (does it appear to be retyped from elsewhere?) and returns an evaluation of whether the document was written by a person from scratch.
The extension generates a private report with the results and a public URL.
If someone else wants to verify that your text is original, they can paste it into this URL to see if it matches the cryptographic fingerprints on Heat Signature’s servers.
