Proof of care in the age of AI

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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...

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.

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?

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

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."

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.

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/

We need a proof-of-care coin.

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)

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....

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

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.

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 :)

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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").

Text to handwriting in 3..2..

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.

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...

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

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.

The medium is the message! Well written.

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

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.