Proof of Care in the Age of A.I

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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'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?

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

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 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.

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?

Text to handwriting in 3..2..

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/

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").

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)

We need a proof-of-care coin.

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....

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.

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?

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.

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

The medium is the message! Well written.

There's never a single trick. Practically any trick to prove humanity can be tricked by AI.

There is no proof, only evidence. The best evidence is consistency of action and attitude. Those who've always cared, even before AI, will likely continue to care after AI, and those who did not care before AI will likely continue not to care. Also, if a person consistently expresses contempt for AI, that's a pretty good indicator they don't use AI. One could of course use AI to write anti-AI screeds repeatedly... but why?

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