Article URL: https://dylan.blog/2026/08/03/im-scared-a-stranger-will.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185556 Points: 15 # Comments: 35

As I’ve mentioned before, we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created. Sit with that for a second, because it’s genuinely deranged. I have been writing fiction since 2014 — unpublished, because getting published is the hard part and I am bad at the hard part — and the thing that keeps me up at night isn’t the rejection. It’s that some stranger is going to read my perfectly normal writing tics, feel that they’re AI, and torpedo the whole dream over a vibe. The part that makes me want to chew glass is that none of this would be a problem if people were just honest about what they used to make a thing. But that’s apparently too much to ask, because cheaters gonna cheat. The first thing I did — because I had to — was see if I could teach an LLM to write fiction. Know your enemy, etc. This was a whole project on its own, because every AI has tics. And it’s not that the tics don’t exist in real writing (I’m looking at you, em-dash, my beloved). It’s that the machine reaches for them constantly. Which is exactly the dilemma. Some human writers lean on the em-dash too. So how do you prove that you put the words on the page and not a robot with a thesaurus? You can’t do it from the words alone. The words are the crime scene, not the alibi. Let me tell you about GitHub, in case you’re not a nerd (I’m a baby nerd, so I’ll keep it gentle). GitHub is where coders keep their projects. It saves versions, it lets you work on new features without breaking the live thing, and — here’s the part I love — it draws you a little heat map showing how much code you committed on each day. That map makes it stupidly easy to tell a human from a machine. Someone who commits 50,000 lines in an afternoon did not type those by hand. Someone doing a couple hundred? Probably real. Simple. The other magic trick is that it keeps all your changes. All of them. Which means writers' oldest nightmare — losing the work — basically stops being possible. If every version is saved, there’s nothing to lose.