# Show Your Work

I had a thought today about students, researchers, or authors being
accused of writing with an LLM, and how one only has the author's
word when they insist they did not use an LLM.

Years ago, it was common for writers to have multiple drafts in some
analog format. The advent of computer writing made this practice
obsolete, but with the ubiquity of "AI" agent and LLM usage, I think
analog hard copies will become increasingly important for people
that care about showing the provenance of their writing. This could
be a first draft hand-written on a legal pad, or something
typewritten on a manual typewriter [0].

While it would be possible to cheat and transcribe the output of an
LLM to some analog format, I'm guessing this won't happen for works
beyond a page or so. The people using LLMs to pump out slop
wholesale are lazy, and won't go to the effort of copying the output
in this way. It would also be very suspicious to have an exact
analog copy of your finished work - the very nature of these draft
formats means that the longer the work, the more errors will creep
in. Keeping your analog drafts would be a way to show the human
effort involved, if the need arose.

It reminds me of math classes when I was attending university years
ago. "Show your work" was always more important than an unexplained
but correct answer. In this case, showing your work was
human-created could be more important than the finished product,
especially if an advance or author's reputation was on the line.

[0]: gopher://sdf.org/I/users/thinknix/images/show-your-work.jpg