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.
This is a triumph of engineering, decades in the making. It is also a tremendous challenge for educators and publishers. One after another, authors get caught using an LLM without disclosing it. Most troubling to me, as a longtime journalist and perpetually aspiring novelist, is the default suspicion this casts on any work published since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
To that end, I’m proud to introduce Heat Signature, a tool that allows writers to proactively demonstrate that they didn’t use artificial intelligence (or anything else) to compose a text. Rather than analyze the words themselves, this service does something different: It examines the patterns of typing, editing and all the other inglorious labor of composition.
For launch, Heat Signature exists as a Chrome extension that can analyze any Google Docs file you have ever composed without software to monitor your keystrokes. This is thanks to the discovery by my friend James Somers that Google saves the entire history of a document every third keystroke or so, meaning we can recreate the whole history of its composition. James has a great Chrome extension of his own called Draftback that replays this history. You should also read his New Yorker articles on what AI has wrought.
The How It Works page has the details, but allow me to list a few of the highlights:
- The Heat Signature server never sees or stores your words
- It works in any language by default
- The model uses both simple metrics and machine learning to detect humanity
- You’re permitted to cut and paste your own words with impunity
- You can cite pasted content from elsewhere to avoid any suspicion
- If in doubt, the model will show you where it’s unsure
- You choose how to present the verification
Before this high horse tosses me, let me hasten to say that I use both ChatGPT and Claude all the time. I found some of the links in this essay using the former to cut through all the marketing content you get with any AI-related search. And more importantly, Claude (via Copilot) did a great deal of the heavy lifting in writing the code for Heat Signature.
Like most programmers I know, I’m comfortable letting LLMs write computer code for me, though I do always check it and avoid strategies I’ve never used myself. I don’t ship code I don’t understand.
And like most writers I know, I’m deeply uncomfortable with LLMs writing English for me. Especially anything I hope to publish. While Heat Signature can absolutely be used to enforce a no-AI policy in a classroom just by requiring students to use a supported platform, I created it with the idea that users would come to it voluntarily. Because authors and writers have it hard enough already. It was bad enough being dead these sixty years. Now, three years into the era of generative AI, we’re fighting to even exist.