Humanly platform lets you prove your writing wasn't AI-generated
A new tool records your typing to create tamper-proof evidence of human effort.
Humanly is a new open-source writing environment from a team including Shenzhe Zhu, Alex Pentland, and others from MIT, Tsinghua, and the University of Chicago. Unlike traditional word processors that only show the final document, Humanly records every action—each keystroke, pause, deletion, and use of AI assistance—and packages that session into a sealed, tamper-evident writing certificate. The certificate includes a configuration-aware anomaly behavior review that can flag suspicious patterns, such as text pasted in bulk or perfectly uniform typing speeds that would indicate automated input rather than human thought.
The platform is designed for three main use cases: academic assignments (teachers can verify students didn't use AI to write essays), peer review (reviewers can trust that reviews are human-origin), and personal certifications (individuals can prove their writing ability). A user study found that both writers and evaluators found Humanly helpful, and a dedicated red-teaming experiment showed that the Humanly Typing Detector can reliably distinguish human hand typing from automated typing scripts—a critical capability as AI-generated text becomes indistinguishable from human writing. The researchers have released the code and paper on arXiv under arXiv:2607.21758.
- Humanly records every keystroke, edit, and AI interaction to create a verifiable writing certificate.
- A red-teaming study confirmed the platform's typing detector can distinguish human hand typing from automated script typing.
- Designed for course assignments, peer review, and personal certification where authorship is disputed.
Why It Matters
As AI writing becomes ubiquitous, Humanly offers a practical way to prove human effort and preserve academic integrity.