Demo: Submission Analysis

Welcome to Heat Signature! We’re thrilled to introduce a new sort of authorship verification tool that never sees your words, just the rhythm of your writing.

This article is an example of the private report you get back after submitting a document. While you could share it, the purpose is to be transparent in how the model reached its conclusion. If the algorithm has any doubts about authorship, you deserve to know why.

For example, I copied and pasted the following quotation from Masahiro Mori’s famous essay that coined the (over-deployed) term “uncanny valley”:

We should begin to build an accurate map of the uncanny valley, so that through robotics research we can come to understand what makes us human.

Even though I cited it in the text, the model has no way of knowing this since it doesn’t see your words. You just as well could have attributed it to Bob Dylan.

Fortunately, we have a process for this. Here’s an actual Bob Dylan lyric about robots:

The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from bein' seen / But that’s just because he doesn’t wanna turn into some machine

When you submit, the system will give you the opportunity to add a citation for any pasted text it detects. It does not check the source if you provide one. In exchange, these citations are public if a user checks your claim of authenticity through the usual means, whereby they paste some or all of the text into the verification URL we provide you. This URL compares the cryptographic fingerprint of the pasted text to the scrambled keys it saves that are unique to your words but cannot be reverse engineered to generate them.

You are further permitted to paste any words that you generated yourself but chose to relocate by cutting or copying. For example, I’m typing this sentence after the third paragraph, but I’m going to cut it and paste it at the place where you’re reading it. The system detected that the pasted text here was genuinely created.

One thing I like about the metadata-only approach is that, seeing as it’s agnostic to the words themselves, it supports any language out of the box. For example, the phrase “uncanny valley,” Wikipedia tells me, is a literal translation of the Japanese phrase “不気味の谷現象.” (I didn’t type that, naturally, but short pasted strings are not flagged so as not to penalize authors for doing things like pasting names to avoid spelling errors.)

It works on mobile devices as well. Here I’m editing on my iPhone. I’m writing this on an iPad.

The model is in its early stages of development, still relying on manual hyperparameters rather than training too heavily on one person’s messy writing style (present). We look forward to hearing all feedback, bug reports, feature requests, and complaints—even from you, Bob Dylan.