Human Authored

What does it mean for writing to be “human authored?”

That previous sentence, posed as a question, was keyed onto a five-year-old HP personal computer with a fan that never stops humming. There was a person at the keyboard thinking while muscle memory - trained by Mavis Beacon and sharpened during the late-night bouts of AOL instant messenger conversations in collegekeyed each word and sentence into an online text editing tool. That person is me: a human.

Is human authored something that I claim about my writing? Is human authored granted by another human to my writing? Is human authored some algorithmic analysis from an AI detector?

“Human Authored” is now an attribute of the media we engage daily. As a feature, it holds a certain non-zero value added to each article, video, or song, similar to how we ascribe certain elevated respect to each new book from our favorite authors. Positive feelings and thoughts automatically bestowed due to the familiarity we’ve had with previous works: I like it, because we’re both humans.

Recently, the Author’s Guild, an antique American institution that protects writers, announced that its books will receive a “Human Authored” seal. [You might know the Author’s Guild from its work fighting big-Google for the unauthorized scanning of every book in existence. The guild lost, but now we have books.google.com.] This “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” is similar to how your steak, broccoli, or coffee might have a “Grass-Fed”, “Certified Organic,” or “Fair Trade” sticker or label, respectively, at the local grocery store. A differentiation against something else which is… less than.

Obviously, the bearer of this “less than” moniker is generative AI-created text: the increasingly passable human-ish text created from the average of humanity sucked up, minced, and regurgitated on demand from your favorite AI Chatbot or dedicated essay writing program. This new class of certification (“Human Authored”) is designed to promote authors and safeguard the general public, which is ostensibly being sold loads of “AI slop” unwittingly through marketplaces like Amazon’s Kindle Store.

Interestingly, the Author’s Guild has entered the same battle currently pitched on virtual and physical campuses around the world: transparency concerning the provenance of written work submitted for marks, grades, credits, and degrees. Teachers, faculty, staff, and administrators want to see the human-verified parts of assignment submissions. Instead of a “human authored” stamp, many faculty are confronted with a percentage score from a detection service or nothing at all, relying on the suspect and under-evolved “spidey sense” that something was AI-generated. For those who trust neither detection tools nor spidey sense, there’s always the fallback option and time-tested methods of having students write in class–with pencils and paper!

In education, online learning, and the classroom, “Human Authored” is what all teachers and faculty are after. The “holy grail” of knowing that the forum post, quiz essay, or submitted paper was written by a (human) student and not just burped out of a prompt-ready chatbot. If we take a page from the Author’s Guild book (pun intended), students could just attest to their humanity and add that stamp to each submission (or leave it off if, you know, AI is permitted).

Easy right? If only.

As a reader of Dirtyword, you care whether the articles included are human authored (just like you probably care what’s getting uploaded to your LMS). Certainly, the editors care whether this column and my future contributions are human authored. Why spend time and effort typesetting and even printing these words on glossy paper if it isn’t?

Trust that the above is human authored. The hard part is whether, if, and how you want to verify that.

Want to discuss?

Hit an actual human up at joe@cursivetechnology.com.

Joseph Thibault is a long time Moodler, writer, and human. He is the CEO/Founder of Cursive Technology, Inc.