# On (provably) writing without AI

Disclosure: this blog is written without AI. Every single word you read in any of the posts here came from my brain (including the word "disclosure" at the beginning of this sentence: an ironic choice, I hope it's clear). This needs to be stated, unfortunately. The blogging platform I am using to write this post, Hashnode, has a little "Ask AI" button in the corner that you can click to generate some text. I find this sad.

I enjoy talking to AI, I honestly do — *when it's clear that it's the AI talking*. Claude is very articulate and sometimes even funny: I explained some of the reasons why I think so in an [earlier post](https://blog.danromik.com/claude-code-has-a-sense-of-humor). I enjoy coding and creating things and doing math and other things with AI. But I very much *don't* enjoy reading texts trying to pass themselves off as written by a human when they are actually written by AI. It gives an icky feeling of someone trying to manipulate me or trying to get my attention or affection without making the effort to earn it, like getting a birthday card from someone when you know they paid their executive assistant to write it.

I also don't enjoy reading something and *suspecting* that it was written (or heavily "assisted") by AI. And this can now happen even when I'm reading content written by someone who didn't use AI at all. And I know I'm not alone in this: we are all now afflicted by a vicious cycle of a collective lack of trust, where every single text that you read is under a shadow of suspicion that it may have been written by AI. This leads us to modify our behavior: to not write things that we might be inclined to write, and to not read things that we might be inclined to read. Was that em dash you see in the previous paragraph a telltale sign that I used AI, or is it just me actually liking em dashes and thinking they're a cool grammatical construct? (It's the latter; and I resisted the temptation to change that em dash to a regular dash.)

I think I have a way of solving this problem. I developed an app called ReelDocs ([https://reeldocs.io](https://reeldocs.io)) that lets you write a document without AI, and provably so: your keystrokes and edits get recorded so the app maintains a record of the timeline of your writing of the document. When you share the document, you also include a link generated by the app: the "reel" link. When a reader of your document wants to convince themselves that a human wrote the document, they click on the reel link, and are shown a webpage with an animation replaying the document's writing (over a compressed time span of 10 seconds).

To demonstrate the concept, I wrote this post in ReelDocs, and plan to start using ReelDocs to write all my blog posts, emails, and any other content I may write where I want others to be reassured that the text was written by a human. You can click the reel link at the bottom of the post to go to the reel animation webpage. And here is the animation itself, embedded right here in the post:

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/69f6f0080ab374db99854035/ed80fb35-7f89-4a18-83a1-d4313d2c612e.gif align="center")

You can use ReelDocs too for writing your own emails, blog posts and other documents: it's free, you can write documents anonymously, and it's not necessary to create an account. Please let me know what you think about the ReelDocs concept, and if you find the app useful. In the meantime, enjoy your (and my) em dashes!

Written without AI using [ReelDocs](https://reeldocs.io/)  
Reel (proof of human authorship): [https://reeldocs.io/d/sf8oMFVroS9MyA](https://reeldocs.io/d/sf8oMFVroS9MyA)