Keystroke Dynamics: My New Rabbit Hole

Did a dangerous thing today and started thinking too much. Now I have an idea that I can’t get out of my head.

My friend @iammatthias shared theamdash.com with me today, and while it came out last year, this was my first time seeing it. It’s been hard to tell if the idea behind am- was a joke, an artistic expression, an attempt at a solution to a real problem, or perhaps all of the above. Regardless, it got me thinking about what a real solution to determining AI vs Human created content in a digital world.

A lot of the initial ideas that came to mind just weren’t good enough. There’s so much AI can do to imitate what a person creates, and we’ve all experienced it. Then I started to think less about the end product, and more about the process. AI will spit something out in a few seconds, while human writing takes much more time and thought. That’s when my sites turned to Keystroke Dynamics.

When a person writes, there are natural pauses, breaks, or rhythms on the keyboard. These patterns actually become a source of identification, or in the field of keystroke dynamics, authentication. What if this was applied to provenance? What if there was a standard + essential libraries that make it possible to prove someone’s identity through their content on any platform?

Down the rabbit hole we go