Proof of care in the age of AI

by jfil • 8 days ago

185 110 8 days ago

pbronez• 8 days ago

The medium is the message! Well written.

falcor842• 8 days ago

Sorry, I couldn't resist and just got Codex to replicate this for me as an OCR-d page on top of an AI-generated image - https://jsfiddle.net/wmLvojr7/

danielparks• 8 days ago

I was genuinely expecting this to be LLM-generated.

Also, what’s his problem with the “Witch Priestess from the North?”

EDIT: Oh, the blue backgrounds are links. https://jacobfilipp.com/new-lord/

altcognito2• 8 days ago

I was genuinely expecting this to be LLM-generated.

It isn’t?

chb2• 8 days ago

Click here to see the "how this was made" feature

^ at the bottom of the article

amelius• 8 days ago

We need a proof-of-care coin.

The_Blade• 8 days ago

i just learned that these exist so you can like, prove that humanitarian funds that were supposed to fund surgery in civil war-torn Africa were actually used to perform surgery

that seems pretty ripe for a new Geldof / Bono combo to use thinking they are doing good

bcjdjsndon2• 8 days ago

Don't handwrite your next post and definitely don't start writing in your own back to front cryptic code.

The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.

It's like lamented handwritten script when the printing press was invented....

fxwin2• 8 days ago

The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something.

That's fine, but I don't think the author would suggest writing e.g. library documentation by hand. It's clearly advice for the creator side of the problem of low signal-to-noise ratio in the digital space and how to stand out/signal, rather than a general rule

jvanderbot• 8 days ago

LLM slop is considered low value because it contains a low information/minute as well as a low effort/minute signal. You want to know that the reader put more effort in than you do, and that it is worth your time. The effort signal just points to a possible high information/minute return.

When someone takes the laborious effort to provide a short paragraph on an insanely complex topic, precisely written without excessive hedging or jargon, and conveying a shortcut or mental model, I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable signal. No amount of fancy medium can top a well-framed idea concisely stated.

bcjdjsndon2• 8 days ago

I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable sign

An infant scrawling the alphabet in its own excrement would have that "signal"...

dfgvfvbcv2• 8 days ago

What differentiates a splendid idea slopped into an article by AI from complete meaningless drivel being chiseled into perfection by a skilled human writer is not the form, but the content.

We arrived in the era of Effective Content: judge a book by its content, not its cover.

E=MC^2 expressed as AI slop article still is light-years ahead of any of, say, Deepak Chopra's work no matter how polished, well-thought or painstakingly handwritten it was.

If I had the algorithm for AGI and I would let Fable write some slop about it you'll still sell your own mother to read it. It's not the form, it's the content.

fidotron• 8 days ago

The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.

Generally speaking the ones that do care are those that also hope their own creations are/will be appreciated by people that similarly pour their heart into them, and they really don't understand that most people just see things for what they as consumers get out of them.

On some level writing on the net now is for an AI audience anyway. (Greetings fellow bots).

AlotOfReading• 8 days ago

When the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, it wasn't used to produce finished documents. Printed books had large margins and omitted initial letters to leave space for the manual steps of rubrication and illumination. Plus, the printing itself was a product of huge amounts of manual typesetting effort.

The results speak for themselves. Those early printed works are beautiful to a degree few other books have managed since.

RetroTechie• 8 days ago

The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something.

The reverse: sometimes people care if you do. "Caring" and "effort" tend to be good indicators.

But imagine there's some yet-undiscovered <something> that has big implications, and conditions exist for its discovery. Then someone stumbles across it, puts out a hasty tweet, walks off & doesn't look back. Took no effort whatsoever, didn't care much about it. Or maybe some AI does that.

Would that reduce the value of the message? Imho: no.

I'm hoping we'll find ways to separate the gems from mountains of slop they're buried in, that don't require AI-powered tools to wade through that slop & pick the gems. Or establish incentives to not produce all that slop in the 1st place. Not sure if that's doable or how.

But I don't care that much about AI-generated or not (although I'd prefer if stuff were marked as such). Useful, well-written, interesting, exactly what you needed, providing a new angle on a subject, innovative: that's where it's at.

Btw I'm all out of soapboxes. Would a potato crate do, in a pinch? Not gettin' a tattoo!

wolttam• 8 days ago

I am commenting only to say that I read the reflected-letter text and found that amusing.

mceachen• 8 days ago

I don't know if it's universal, but your non-dominant hand may form reflected letters delightfully easily if you air-write simultaneously with your dominant hand.

fxwin2• 8 days ago

That was a fun read! I caught myself almost skimming the first part until i got to the mirrored paragraph, and slowed down significantly after that to read more deliberately.

I'm not sure how much actual advice one can take from this essay though beyond "use personal commitment (e.g. time or presence) to signal importance/care" and "go offline" (aka touch grass)

MontagFTB2• 8 days ago

TLDR proof of care from the article: a low bandwidth process (e.g., from handwriting to tattooing it on your body) that you voluntarily put your words through to convey their level of personal importance.

Some of his examples were tongue in cheek. But even handwriting feels a little too laborious when what we lost that needs replacement is manual typing.

UnfitFootprint• 8 days ago

Not to mention accessibility, which as usual benefits everyone with features such as text search, so I guess we‘ll keep looking for an answer.

Typewriters?

MontagFTB2• 8 days ago

I have heard of some high school classes reverting to typewriters. So your suggestion holds some weight.

halfax• 8 days ago

i think the point is good, hadwriting forces you to think more, even from typing the same.. BUT , i am unsure this would be proof you wrote it or AI genereated it , same with tatoos , AI can genereate picutres of said Tatoo...

raphaeldelio2• 8 days ago

Even though it doesn't prove the author wrote it himself, it at least proves he had to thoroughly read it before sharing.

RevEng5• 8 days ago

This isn't about proof that you wrote it - it's about proof that you care. It was important enough that you spent the effort to write it out, or were so dedicated that you committed to wearing it on your body forever. It could be someone else's message, but you are proving it is important to you by showing a personal sacrifice to share the message.

lezojeda• 8 days ago

I'm 100% sure an AI grifter will see this and start creating blogposts with AI-generated images of handwritten text.

falcor842• 8 days ago

I'm not a grifter and am not looking to use this for anything myself, but I just found myself nerdsniped to get Codex to reproduce this, and had it also write it up as a skill - https://droptext.cc/9jfbn

malty_on_rock• 8 days ago

This was something that bugged me while writing. Someone even asked, What's the point if people aren't going to read the whole thing? Reading this made my day, not just because of the content, but because someone else cared enough to tackle the same problem. Good one, Sire.

jfil3• 8 days ago

I'm glad it hit the spot. There is a piece by Christian Miles that got me thinking in this direction, which you might enjoy: https://ammil.industries/i-know-you-didnt-write-this/

128byte• 8 days ago

archived, easier to read: https://nonogra.ph/proof-of-care-in-the-age-of-ai-07-14-2026

dgabriel• 8 days ago

This misses the point.

throwawayffffas• 8 days ago

The article misses the point of writing.

spelk• 8 days ago

People with visual impairments and other functional limitations don't deserve nice things apparently, like dignity online.

miles_matthias2• 8 days ago

I love this problem and think it's super important. I've similarly noticed myself using a whiteboard to think critically for a while and then take a picture of the whiteboard as proof of deep thought, even if the next step is AI supplemented (a doc, a video, etc).

I've also started noticing people annotating a whole doc "written by humans" to try to convey effort and care. That's fine for some things but do that too often and a reader will be left with two thoughts:

1. Did they actually write this by hand? No way 2. Should they have written some of this with AI? Seems like a waste of time formatting some of this when they could've been spending their time thinking critically

b40d-48b2-979e• 8 days ago

What do you mean "no way"? We've written long texts for as long as we've been writing as a species.

psd13• 8 days ago

Not GP, but consider the view from the inside of a feckless pleb's skull. Effort is to be avoided, so its needless expenditure is unrelatable.

miles_matthias2• 8 days ago

it's not that it's completely unbelievable, but I could see people having doubts considering:

1. AI exists and is widely used 2. A person only has so much bandwidth. If they put out 10 docs in a day, did they really hand write them all?

ge96• 8 days ago

tangent rant, annoys me like "yeah senior engineer" or whatever, "yeah I can do that", puts the task into AI, puts up a dogshit PR can't explain how it works

now more than ever can fake it

avgDev• 8 days ago

What do you mean the RAM goes brrr and the CPU goes tick tock and things just happen.

jimmiles• 8 days ago

If I had handwritten this, there would be at least one (likely lots more) errors in writing crossed out mingled in with the text. That there isn't makes me wonder why such a lengthy sample contains seemingly zero handwriting errors. Is that plausible?

EDIT: After seeing the comments, I am realizing how little I ever rewrote my own writings, an admitted weakness of mine. It was the blindspot behind which I made my reply!

raphaeldelio2• 8 days ago

You can write a draft first and then transcribe it once it's done without any mistakes. That's how I had to write essays when I was at school.

Kerrick• 8 days ago

You can handwrite more than just your first draft. It was common before the proliferation of computers to handwrite early drafts in pencil, and then handwrite the final manuscript with ink.

thewebguyd2• 8 days ago

It was common before the proliferation of computers

We always had to write our first couple drafts in pencil/handwritten in school. Eventually we moved to typing the final draft by the time I hit high school but exams were always handwritten still and now I feel quite "old" at 38 knowing that there are adults on this very forum that probably did not have to handwrite much beyond elementary school.

psd13• 8 days ago

Yes, your bias is showing. Before Gutenberg, "scribe" was a profession, and perfect fidelity was expected.

We also don't know how many sheets went in the bin.

patcon• 8 days ago

In grammar school in the 90s, I used to write in pencil, then retrace in pen when done, erasing the underlying pencil after the ink dried. I'd proofread the pencil version, find missing words, and you could rewrite to balance out space

I think that was pretty common amongst "keeners" doing writing assignments.

voidUpdate• 8 days ago

While I appreciate the work put into this, I found it pretty hard to read because of the authors handwriting. I would never do this myself because I know that I have awful handwriting, and people would struggle to read it

ivanjermakov• 8 days ago

Scroll to the end, text is intentionally copy-pasteable. Press ctrl+a and read it in Comic Sans :).

chb2• 8 days ago

Am I the only one who thinks the ending is a non-sequitur? How is the hackneyed, "the kids are allright" [sic] related to the preceding content?

pphysch• 8 days ago

Yeah and if this were taken seriously, you would have Mechanical Turk style services where poors are paid pennies to hand-write submitted/generated slop, defeating the purpose.

RevEng5• 8 days ago

They covered that situation with the pen plotter. There are signals of commitment that you can't fake. The article isn't saying anything about accuracy or authorship, only that you actually cared about what you were communicating enough to put in some self sacrifice, and that this is a useful signal to help decide if something is worth listening to.

arkhiver• 8 days ago

this is easier to read: https://nonogra.ph/proof-of-care-in-the-age-of-ai-07-14-2026

esafak• 8 days ago

We need to normalize provenance tracking and sharing, similar to how git lets you separate the author from the committer.

I would go further and quantify how much of the message is AI in situations where humans edit it.

xnorswap• 8 days ago

I'm unreasonably distracted by the fact that the illustrations of the tattoos are on the back of the "Subtraction" page.

That is consistent for both pages, but inconsistent with how they seem to be ordered within the text.

I guess the chapters were re-arranged post-script, with the "Storytellers" chapter inserted between them later?

jfil3• 8 days ago

Ooh, sharp eye ;-) You are correct.

werber• 8 days ago

I didn't finish the article, it was slightly difficult to read due to handwriting, and I'm not sure if I would have gotten any more value if I had continued. The mere of act of having written, or prompted to get something written is not intrinsically valuable to me. I have a degree in English literature, and I do not feel confident in my ability to discern AI writing from human anymore. I wasn't sure when I stopped reading if the images had been generated or not, and I don't know if it matters either way.

If you cannot demonstrate why I should continue reading by the quality of your writing alone, I'm not going to finish what you have written. I put down maybe half of the books I start without finishing, plenty of them written well before 2022 just because I am not enjoying them, or find the writing bad, or boring, or overly pedantic, or a million other reasons that are specific to me and my own bad taste.

I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof. Writing is either useful or not useful, good or bad for the reader, and making the reading experience worse to prove your worthiness as a writer provides me no value. If you need to be reassured that something was not written by a large language model, and that's enough for you to consider something worth reading your standards are lower than I will ever be comfortable dropping mine too.

mschuster913• 8 days ago

I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof.

The problem, at least for me, is that I don't trust AI. Subtle mistakes, outright hallucinations, or mistakes/omissions that an actual expert of the domain would immediately notice, whatever.

And as soon as I encounter anything that even looks like one of the typical AI tells or, in long content, a lack of cohesion or repetition... I can't help myself from immediately second-guessing every little thing in the content. And where there's smoke, usually there is fire... and I find myself annoyed for having wasted time to read something I had to crosscheck with other sources and found my suspicions confirmed. At least sometimes I learn something from digging into original sources, but frankly, I don't have the time for that.

Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.

BeetleB6• 8 days ago

Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?

Of all the reasons to dislike AI writing, this is an odd one.

Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.

I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder. And I say that with all seriousness.

elil172• 8 days ago

I think that perhaps you would have gotten more out of finishing it - given that you would have found out that it is more of a short story than an "article."

BeetleB6• 8 days ago

Yes, but not a particularly good story.

rob74• 8 days ago

I have to admit I skipped to the end, but the conclusion of the article seems to be: "If you really care about something, make a song and dance about it. Around a bonfire. While wearing feathers and a mask. Drugs are optional, but recommended."?

...which reminded me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyk5U2p-msk ("I must be a narcissist / God knows that I can’t resist / To make a song and dance about it").

dfgvfvbcv2• 8 days ago

Guard your mental resources. You always should have, but in the age of AI it is no longer optional.

Simple algorithm for not wasting your time:

1) By default nothing is valuable or worth your while 2) Aggressively hunt for signals indicating potential worth (ancient pedigree and/or critical acclaim being most valuable) 3) Choose maybe 10% of what survives for actual reading, scan some others and dump the rest

Oh, and let LLMs summarize near-zero information articles like this one.

cwmoore2• 8 days ago

This sounds like work for a personally aligned local agent interacting with your past and future media timeline.

It probably exists in some form, any suggestions?

bigfishrunning• 8 days ago

This sounds like work for a personally aligned local agent interacting with your past and future media timeline.

I have one of those. It's me. I'm my personally aligned local agent.

You can be yours too, as long as the atrophy hasn't set in yet.

bryanlarsen• 8 days ago

Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crud) applies more than ever in the age of AI.

The best filter is time -- the cream does eventually rise to the top. And conveniently the time filter also excludes AI slop.

RevEng5• 8 days ago

There is plenty of info here. That you failed to notice it is a separate issue.

a_c2• 8 days ago

Text to handwriting in 3..2..

elil172• 8 days ago

I feel like perhaps you did not read the whole piece

a_c2• 8 days ago

You got me.

woadwarrior012• 8 days ago

I've been thinking about something similar for a while now. Although my scheme involves cryptographic attestation and typing stuff with hands.

trollbridge• 8 days ago

Quite easy to rig up a machine to type on a keyboard. I guess you could require a video of it being typed.

Then, the typist could simply be typing in an AI generated piece of text.

The only solution is to trust the person who handed you the work to accurately tell you the author, and then trust the author to be telling you any attribution.

I personally have earned this trust as people know anything I AI generate will have an Assisted-by: tag on it.

woadwarrior012• 8 days ago

Agree. OTOH, people have been using plotters for simulating handwriting. Also, nothing preventing someone from hand-copying an AI written piece as I'm sure lots kids are doing these days for take-home assignments.

zparky2• 8 days ago

Not surprised to see such negative comments, this forum is fried by LLMs nowadays. I was immediately intrigued by reading a handwritten blog post, and enjoy ergodic literature, like this! I liked the message too, and this might shove me toward some handwriting projects I've been meaning to tackle lately.

lioeters2• 8 days ago

What an interesting word, "ergodic". Searching for its meaning led me to some curious corner of mathematics and physics. Then I found this definition:

Ergodic literature is a mode of textual organization in which nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text, beyond ordinary eye movement or turning pages.

The specific use of the term comes from:

  Aarseth, Espen J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.

Fascinating, it's like an aesthetic choice of medium or form of representation, expanding what text or literature is capable of.

(By the way, is your user name a joke on "sparky", the slang word for an electrician?)

zparky2• 7 days ago

There's a few books that are coupled with the term ergodic literature, chief among them House of Leaves. It really is a thoroughly enjoyable exercise to read that book, I highly recommend.

(By the way, is your user name a joke on "sparky", the slang word for an electrician?)

It wasn't originally when I used it as a kid, but I grew in to that term later :)

nlawalker• 8 days ago

Proving care still leaves the audience to determine if the care is in the message or in attracting attention.

doug_durham• 8 days ago

Handwriting is inherently ableist. A portion of the population is blessed with the inherent ability of fast, legible handwriting. A portion of the population is not. Typing is an equalizer that allows more people to participate in the conversation.

aqfamnzc• 8 days ago

I hope you're joking. In case you're serious, the same argument could be made about typing, speaking, or really any related activity. Or communication in general.

RevEng5• 8 days ago

If this were the only option, sure. It's not - the article points out several other possibilities. Just because one option isn't accessible to all doesn't mean we have to accuse the author of being ableist. We don't take away writing from some people because others can't do it - we provide alternatives.

beybol• 8 days ago

I think most people wouldn't appreciate it these days :(

greenoracle9• 8 days ago

A long handwritten essay used to at least prove someone spent time on it.

gnarlouse• 8 days ago

I've sort of been thinking about this in terms of software dev lifecycle & PRs/code review.

Maybe PRs these days need to "test" the human? "Explain how this code works, without AI, or it gets rejected."

bearjaws• 8 days ago

I've been debating switching my blog to a vlog that is a one shot recording, no retakes, just real thoughts and advice in real time.

I've joked with friends its the "Farm to table" for thoughts, at least as much as it can be. Obviously you can just recite a LLM output, but that's more work IMO.

bensyverson• 8 days ago

There's honestly something to this [0]… you should do it!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@AlexanderTheCreate

DanielHB• 8 days ago

LLM corporate slop is the new version big data reports that nobody reads.

I am sad this infected code documentation and PR descriptions. This kind of stuff used to exist in order keep managers/executives busy not to keep engineers busy...

bens74• 8 days ago

My wife's mother tongue is a relatively niche language (I don't want to name it here) that hasn't been a priority for our big tech overlords. It's writing system isn't supported out-of-the-box by any platform, there's no machine translation or OCR, and no LLMs are able to produce it convincingly yet. People sometimes communicate by taking pictures of handwritten notes, or with voice messages.

I've long been frustrated by the lack of support, but within the last few months had a change of perspective. I realized that this is actually a blessing! This language is the only remaining text on the Internet that I read and am sure is not LLM generated. And when spoken, I believe much less infected by LLM-isms that English.

I've done some work building an OCR corpus, but actually stopped now and don't plan to complete it. Working OCR would unlock text that the AI labs would slurp up, train on, and improve their infinite slop generators. We don't need that.

jfil3• 8 days ago

In the cyber bowels of Neo Tokyo, there is only one rule: real hackers speak Navajo

ddp26• 8 days ago

When I know something is (primarily) AI generated, I lose interest.

The exception is when it's about a niche I care about, e.g. an analysis of opening trends of early world chess champions. I'll read AI on that for an hour.

My sense is that, for most writing, it's fundamentally interpersonal, the information is about the author as much as it is about the world.

Maybe this flood of slop will cause people to care more about the substance of the writing, not the perspectives of the writing.

maerF0x0• 8 days ago

There's a coming reckoning with how little effort actually matters in the grand scheme of things. If your job takes you 10 seconds or 10 minutes or 10 hours, you havent done a "better job". If someone sits and thinks for an hour about a subject or an AI gives the answer in <10 seconds it doesn't imply one outcome is better than the other.

At the end of the day your toil is roughly meaningless to those around you, they only truly care about the outcomes -- both material and emotional -- for themselves. What do I get and how did you make me feel seems to be the only currency between humans, maybe it wasn't always this way but it sure seems to be near universal now.

Edit: also the how this was made was really quite clever :)

csallen• 8 days ago

It's not that hard for AI to generate images of handwriting.

theopsimist• 8 days ago

Typewriters work too. I’m toying with the idea of starting an online journal that only accepts submissions written by hand or by mechanical typewriters.

txoria• 8 days ago

When you receive a handwritten letter addressed to you, you get a feeling that a sender cares. When you read such a blog post, you get a feeling that the author has nothing better to do.

But what a great idea nevertheless - proof of care! Instead of checking if you are human and not a malicious bot, they shoud require a proof that you do care about what you are going to access. Like - I don't know - write by hand on the screen a short essay on how accessing the site will make you happy.

EDIT: Or - better yet - make a tattoo with an URL of the site you want to access, and then upload a selfie.

casey2• 8 days ago

You don't need all this. All you need is to simply explain what purpose the tech serves and explain how it solves that problem. And then compete in a fair market with other makers trying to solve the same problem. All tech slop fails at one of these three things, the vast majority all three.

If you want to stop the dysfunction become involved in your government and get stronger antitrust legislation passed. OR you could write everything by hand, take pictures and pretend image models don't exist.

cadamsdotcom• 8 days ago

Oh god he misspelled "alright".

Right at the end too. Shame.

Better write it out again...

Love how the handwriting changes and you can see the author get into flow. My reading sped up to match, like I was right with the author as they wrote. The whole thing was a beautifully connected, human experience. Bravo!

rogual• 8 days ago

I can honestly say I've never seen a young man with "GRIND HARD" tattooed across his forehead.

pvsk10• 8 days ago

Except that AI can generate hand-written text too, so that will not necessarily server as proof either

Proof of care in the age of AI

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