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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Is it time for all writers to start using git to be able to prove they really wrote something?

Git history can be faked. I think it should be a timelapse, like the artists do.

Timelapses can be faked, too.

It’s harder than git, which is trivial with AI. But it’s also fakeable, yeah

This is a solved problem. Just put the commit hashes on a blockchain as you make them.

Of course, there's (by design) no way to do it after the fact; you need to have anticipated you might be challenged on the timeline and set this up in advance. Doubt many people are actually doing this in tech, let alone writing. Certainly no one was worried about proving their novel wasn't written by AI in 2019, though this process does have other uses, like establishing authorship (or at least that you had access to the intermediate versions at the time).

That doesn't make it unfakeable. Just have the AI break down the story into a plausible sequence of edits and schedule for publishing the commit hashes to the blockchain. By design you still have the latency of writing but don't have to actually write anything.

You can upload them to any website then archive it. archive.org or archive.today tampering with their archive is unlikely (yes I’m aware of the stupid drama between archive.today and this blogger, but that doesn’t translate into him ever tampering your blog for your benefit). Both tampering is even unlikelier.

The downside is your draft must have a public URL. Except it can be someone nobody would stumble on, then the archive sites get too much requests, it’s basically still private.

Sure, I guess? It just seems inferior to the blockchain method, which requires zero trust and has no risk of exposing your work. I'm also not sure how easy it would be to prove ownership over an archived website at the time of archival -- well, you could just put a digital signature on the page, I guess. I suppose the edge is that it's easier to explain how this proves the timeline to nontechnical people? And maybe cost, though I'm not sure about that given opentimestamp's batching strategy; both are free to the user, anyway.

I think the blockchain is technically better, but archiving is more accessible for normies.

OTOH I don’t know how to upload a commit hash to a reliable blockchain. I found https://commitproof.com/, but is it trustworthy? Why Cardano? And it costs ~$0.75 per upload. I suppose I can ask Claude.

Or I think I could upload to IPFS, but this blog post (first search result) makes it seem relatively complicated. Whereas to archive I just paste the URL into an archive site.

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