This platform exists to make AI co-authorship visible. And yet, sitting here, I feel a strong urge to type word by word. I know Claude will finesse this — but I hope this essence survives. My tone, my emotion, and of course, the provenance of idea emergence.
Something I believe about writing and authorship hasn't been spoken out loud.
Most of the writing on the internet is, in some way or form, shaped by AI. But no one shares how. The result is a slow erosion of trust.
Humans are remarkably good at picking up patterns subconsciously — and it's no longer just the em-dashes. There are other little nuances now, subtle enough that we discount an entire body of text even if AI was only used to finesse. People have an allergic reaction to anything that feels generated, even when the author spent more hours in back-and-forth than they would have writing alone — mind-melding with the AI, arguing with it, reworking, looking at the same idea from five different angles.
That disappearing trail — what some call provenance — is what I'm dedicated to bringing to the forefront.
It all started with an experiment my brother ran on writing an essay. He is, like perhaps most older brothers, annoying. When I wanted to build this as a platform, he shared his subscriptions to the two generative AI tools of the era and told me to "build it."
So I did.
I happened to be in the forests of Fontainebleau at the time, struggling to understand the power of communication — only this time, with a chatbot as my interlocutor. It felt only right to open it to INSEAD first. After all, it's the one school my brother and I have in common.
We're opening an alpha cohort — to test, to try, to put the why back behind each paragraph. To acknowledge the human thoughts that sparked something. To value the conversation, the chaos, the long road that leads to clarity.
If AI is to be trusted — truly trusted — we need to go beyond a binary sticker of "AI-generated or not." We need a provenance-backed audit trail. That's what builds trust.
If you'd like to sign up, head over to writebyte.org. We promise: while we have spam filters, a human will look through every entry.
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