January 27th 2025

Writing as "Something Humans Do"

Screenshot of the iTypedMyPaper desktop app

In preparing this blog, I wrote multiple drafts that recounted in varying detail my career as a writer. I've told this story to many people in my life. Perhaps I'll write it down here in more detail someday. Through all those drafts I've realized, though, this blog isn't about that.

Yes, I fulfilled a childhood dream by supporting myself on my writing earnings alone.

Yes, in the two years since ChatGPT came online and made large language models accessible to the masses, my ghostwriting business on Fiverr has trended toward zero.

I got to watch it all happen in slow motion. While I was working as a freelance writer, I was keeping up with my other passion, computers. I remember the first time I made a call to the GPT-3 API in 2020. It felt like magic. Machine learning wasn't new to me either. For several years, I had been working with packages like scikit-learn to deliver TV and movie recommendations on Bingeclock. GPT-3 felt fundamentally different, though: it seemed to cross the threshold, tenuous and abstract though it was, between software that could understand us and software that could get us.

Shortly after ChatGPT came online, I called my dad – my first teacher and the guy who introduced me to the computer in the first place. I told him that with the models what they were – and GPT-4 was still several months away, remember – this technology would completely disrupt ghostwriting as a profession.

He was incredulous. He reminded me of an aphorism he had repeated often during our conversations about programming when I was a kid: “Shit in, shit out." You can't get something out of a program unless you put it in there first. “It can't do what you can do," he told me.

I thought he was wrong at the time. Since then, I have come to a much more frustrating conclusion: he was right, but it didn't matter. I appreciate my own writing practice today more than I ever have. Yet, the work did in fact disappear. Buyers wanted to pay lower prices. Instead of hiring a ghostwriter, they wanted to hire an editor for their AI-generated text.

Fiverr's business model, a race to the bottom through which I had earned good money in part because of my status as a Top-Rated Seller they promoted heavily to their highest-paying buyers, seemed no longer to have a place for the kind of work that I wanted to do as a writer. At the same time, I read about students who had been falsely accused of passing off AI-generated essays as their own.

I couldn't let that happen to me if I intended to keep writing as I always had. I let my inner paranoia take over and got to building. I created several programs during 2023 and 2024. Some of them recorded keystrokes. Others did that and tracked gaze. I toyed with one that captured audio for acoustic analysis, inspired by "A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards", a paper that came out in August 2023. (The same month, Scott Aaronson's Berkeley talk "Watermarking of Large Language Models" was a huge revelation for me too, highlighting the fact that while watermarking is possible, it is not something that can be "performed in reverse" so to speak, as multiple "AI detectors" had sprung up to claim.)

Now, I release in public an iteration of these tools: iTypedMyPaper. This is the first human authentication product from Humthentic, Inc. It features an easy-to-use desktop app, which captures keystroke data and then sends it along with your writing to our server, where we generate a report that analyzes your typing to confirm its unique-to-you natural signature. In effect, it gives you hard evidence that you did your writing manually.

I still think, from these early days of 2025, typing this in Microsoft Word, which insists on prompting me to use its AI Copilot that it installed without asking my permission, there will be a place for non-AI writing in the world. It will not only exist in journals and on blogs like this one. iTypedMyPaper is a step toward preserving writing as something humans do.

From January 27th through May 1st, 2025, you can use iTypedMyPaper to generate Humthentication reports 100% free. Create your account to download the desktop app and start your first piece of Humthenticated writing!