202507261254 Proof of thought

#new

For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent _some_time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.

Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. Not only text, in fact. Code, images, video. All kinds of media. We can't rely on proof-of-thought anymore.¹

This article by Alex Martsinovich was concerned mostly with the changes that AI is causing to writing as a proof that someone had to think about something to write it down. I agree with the article, but I still think the idea of writing (or other actions or outcomes) as a proof-of-thought is interesting.

How can we prove that something was thought through? How can we prove something had any thought put into it at all or perhaps whether it had a great deal of thought put into it? I suppose that there are tells for these things and like the article mentions, they are getting harder to discern in the current "AI" context.

I won't try to enumerate any specific proofs here because for every example, there are surely counterexamples. This alone complicates the notion of proof-of-thought a great deal though because it clearly makes the "proof" portion of it harder to ascertain or agree on.

Another tantalizing question that this raises is, "when is the facsimile of thought good enough even if there was no thought?" For some purposes, there is no situation where it's good enough and for others, there's likely only low bar to clear before it's good enough.