Prove your writing is not AI-generated by tracking changes in your docs

Showing your work is not just for math problems anymore. DIY Technology Tracking changes is a simple way to show that a document is all your own work. (Kaitlyn Baker / Unsplash) SHARE AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard have now reached a level where they can write emails , essays, and entire books . There's an ongoing debate on how good that content actually is, but these platforms can certainly give a passable impression of a human being when it comes to creating copy. That's a problem when it comes to proving you wrote a particular document, whether you're submitting a college essay or entering a short story competition. Right now, we don't have a reliable way of detecting AI-generated text (ChatGPT can't tell if ChatGPT has written something), but there are some options you can explore. One is to track the changes to your document as you create it in your program of choice. It's not a foolproof option, as you could still manually type out any output from ChatGPT or Bard, but it does at least show whoever's reading your document how it came together, if they ever want to check. Google Docs Every document you create on Google Docs tracks changes by default, and you can't turn this feature off. The idea is that previous versions of the file are always available to you, should you need to go back. Click the version history button in the top right corner (an arrow around a pair of clock hands) to see previous edits and revert back to them if needed. Via File , Version history , and Name current version you're able to manually set a point in the version history and give it a name—you might want to do this after the end of every chapter in a novel, or every day in a report, for example. Google Docs labels unnamed versions only with the time and date, so this makes previous versions easier to find. [Related: OpenAI's newest ChatGPT update can still spread conspiracy theories ] When it comes to passing on […]