A record of your writing process that you keep, and anyone can check
A writing process record shows how a text came to be: the typing, the deletions, the pastes and the pauses, in order, with their times. Here is what makes one worth trusting, where most of them are kept, and how to keep one yourself.
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OBSCURA Authorship keeps a record of your writing as you write, in your browser on your own device: every run of typing, deletion, cut, paste, undo and redo, with its time, sealed in blocks chained by SHA-256 and, if you choose, timestamped by an independent authority. You hand over one .oauthor file; anyone checks it free at /verify-authorship and replays the writing.
What makes a record worth trusting
- It is kept while you write, not reconstructed afterwards.
- It cannot be edited without showing. Authorship seals the record in blocks; each holds the SHA-256 of the block before and of the document after it, so changing, moving or removing any event breaks every hash after it.
- It is anchored in time by someone else. An RFC 3161 timestamp is a signed statement from a time-stamping authority that a fingerprint of the record existed at a moment. Without one, somebody with the whole record could rebuild every hash; with one, nothing before it can have changed since.
- Anyone can check it, with nothing but the file, and without trusting the company that made the tool. The format is written out in full at the top of
oauthor.js, the free code the checking page runs.
What is recorded, and what is not
Recorded: the text’s changes and their times, keys gathered into runs so that a 5,000-word essay’s record is under a hundred kilobytes; pastes and drops, with their words kept apart so that you can withhold a passage later; formatting, links and footnotes; undo and redo; when the window lost and regained the focus; each session. Not recorded: anything outside the editor, what is on your screen, your keystroke timings key by key, or anything about you.
What is sent
While you write, nothing. With timestamps on, the SHA-256 of the record’s latest block, 32 bytes from which nothing about your words can be worked out, goes through this site to DigiCert’s public authority (or Sectigo’s), and a signed token comes back. The checking page sends nothing at all.
What it shows, and what it cannot
A record shows how and when a work came to exist on the device that recorded it, and that it was not altered after each timestamp. The checking page gives the figures as facts: the time span, the active writing time, the sessions, the characters typed and pasted, the largest pastes and when they arrived, and how much was revised.
What no record can do is prove that no AI was involved. Someone could read text from another screen and type it in by hand, and a determined forger could write a program that types for them. A record makes that expensive, because every pause, slip and revision has to be produced in real time and the timestamps fix when each part existed; it does not make it impossible. Anybody who tells you a tool can prove a negative is selling something.
Questions people ask about A record of your writing process that you keep, and anyone can check
What is a writing process record?
A record of how a text was written: the typing, deletions, pastes, revisions and pauses, in order, with their times. A good one is kept while you write, cannot be edited without showing, and is timestamped by someone independent.
How big is an Authorship record?
Small: keys are kept as runs. A scripted 5,000-word session measured 94 KB of record, 28 KB once the bundle compresses it.
Is my keystroke rhythm recorded?
No. Keys are gathered into runs with the run's start and length of time, so the record shows when you wrote and how much, not the timing of each key.
Can I leave something out before sharing?
Yes. The words of pastes, drops, imports, links and footnotes are kept apart under a salted fingerprint, and can be withheld. The chain and timestamps still check; the document is unchecked only while those words are in it.
- A Grammarly Authorship alternative that keeps the record with youGrammarly Authorship, GPTZero's replay and Google Docs history keep your writing record in their accounts.
- How to prove you did not use AI to write somethingNo test can prove a text was not written with AI. What you can show is how it was written: drafts, history and a timestamped record of the process.
- Falsely accused of using AI: what to doAccused of using AI on work you wrote yourself? What a detector score does and does not show, what to ask for, and the evidence you can give.
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