How to prove you wrote it yourself

An AI detector reads a finished piece and estimates how much it resembles text a model would produce. It is a guess about the sentences, not a record of what happened, and plain, careful, well-edited writing is exactly what it is most likely to mistake. Why detectors flag human writing goes into it.

It works the other way too. Nothing you do to the sentences proves anything: adding typos, dropping the em dashes or running the piece through a tool that promises to make it read as human changes what a detector says, not what happened, and costs you your own voice.

Anything made while you wrote, with its date on it:

• –Version history. Google Docs, and Word for files kept on OneDrive or SharePoint, keep dated versions of a document as it grows.
• –Drafts and notes: an outline, an earlier file, a notebook, a note on your phone, an email to yourself.
• –Your sources: the articles and books you read, your highlights, your browser history for the days you worked.
• –What you can say about it. Somebody who wrote a piece can say why a paragraph is where it is, what they cut, and what they would change.
• –A record made as you wrote: an editor that keeps how the text arrived, typed, pasted in or deleted, and lets somebody else check it.

1. Find the history before anything else. If you wrote in Google Docs, the version history is in the document itself; see how to use it as evidence. Share the original, not a copy: a copy starts with no history of its own.
2. Collect what came before the draft: notes, outlines, earlier files and sources, each with its date.
3. Write down how you wrote it: when, where, over how many sittings, and what changed between the first draft and the last. A short, plain account is easier to weigh than a long, angry one.
4. Offer to talk it through, or to write something comparable where the person doubting you can see.

If you are answering an accusation, there is a guide for that.

Keep a record from the first word. Whichever way you do it, a record only covers writing done where it was kept, from the moment it started.

• –Write in Google Docs or Word and keep the history. It costs nothing, but it lives inside the document, it thins out as versions are merged, its owner can delete it, and showing it means giving somebody access.
• –Grammarly Authorship records whether text was typed, pasted or AI-assisted in Google Docs, Word and Grammarly’s own editor, and gives you a report to share. It needs a Grammarly account and the Grammarly extension or app.
• –iwrote records how the words arrive as you write in the browser, then certifies the piece with a short link to put under it. Whoever opens the link sees how it was written, and can check the record without taking iwrote’s word for it.

Start writing on iwrote, or see what a reader gets.

No, and it is better not to claim it is. A record describes how text arrived, not where the ideas came from: something read elsewhere and retyped looks like something written from scratch. It is evidence, to be weighed with everything else, and what a certificate cannot prove is written down.