Ways to show your writing is human, compared

A line at the end of a piece, an about page, or the statement Substack lets writers add to explain their process (Substack). It costs nothing and tells readers where you stand. It is also a claim anybody can make, including somebody who did not write their piece, so it reassures the readers who already trust you and does little for the ones who do not.

Not By AI offers badges for work its maker estimates is at least 90% human, free for non-commercial use and with a subscription for commercial use. It says plainly what it is not: “Not By AI is not an AI detection tool,” and it is for people who want to advocate for human work “rather than for those seeking evidence of human-produced content” (notbyai.fyi). A badge is a statement with a design.

Pangram, GPTZero, Turnitin and others estimate how much a finished text resembles a model’s. Anybody can run one, which makes it feel like evidence, but it is a guess about the words, and it flags human writing, especially clear, edited prose and writing in a second language. Using one on your own drafts invites you to change your style until it stops objecting. Why detectors flag human writing.

Free, already there if you write in Google Docs, and good evidence: a dated trail of a document growing over days. But only somebody with edit access can see it, so showing it means sharing the document or taking screenshots; unnamed versions merge over time; and its owner can delete it. Using version history as evidence.

Works inside Google Docs, Microsoft Word and Grammarly’s own editor, and records whether text was typed, pasted or AI-assisted. It produces a report, colour-coded sentence by sentence, which you decide when to share. It needs a Grammarly account and the extension or app, and its page speaks mostly to students handing work to a teacher (Grammarly).

A web editor built by the journalist Harry Cheadle (his post). You type a calibration passage, then write with pasting blocked while every keystroke is recorded, and it gives you a signed attestation and a link to put on your post (certifiedhuman.tech). Blocking paste is strict: a quotation has to be typed out, and a draft written elsewhere cannot be brought in.

A place to write in the browser that records how the words arrive: what was typed, pasted in, deleted and rewritten, and where the pauses fell. Pasting is allowed and recorded as pasting, so a quotation is fine. When the piece is done you certify it and put a short link under it. Whoever opens the link sees how the piece was written, and can check the record without taking iwrote’s word: it is signed with a published key, dated by a timestamping service iwrote does not run, and, if the writer shares the log, recomputed in the reader’s own browser.

• –The cost: you write in iwrote, not in the Substack editor, Google Docs or wherever you write now.
• –It covers writing done on iwrote, from the first word. It cannot vouch for a piece already published.
• –It is evidence about a writing session, not proof of authorship, and what it cannot establish is written down.

See what a reader gets, read what it cannot prove, or start writing.

• –If your readers already trust you, a statement may be all you need.
• –If you write essays in Google Docs for a teacher, keep the version history, or use Grammarly Authorship where your school accepts it.
• –If readers you have never met need to be able to check, you need a record they can open from the piece itself, like Certified Human’s or iwrote’s. Choose between those on whether you can give up pasting, and on whether a reader can check the record without trusting whoever issued it.