How to keep track of authorship with Obsidian in GenAI times

Last month, a publishing deal for a crime novel was cancelled after the literary agents lost faith in the author’s use of GenAI in the writing and editing of the novel. Earlier this year, the winning short story of the prize from Caribbean on Saturday faced accusations of being written with GenAI. Last year, Deloitte was under fire for submitting two government reports citing AI-hallucinated research.
And Substack’s integration of the AI detector Pangram has already generated a lot of discussion about what’s created with AI and its accuracy.

When AI-generated content, or the way conscientious companies put it - AI-assisted content is becoming common, how do you keep track of what was human-made or human-checked? Beyond the process discussion, there’s a critical element of (information) trust here. Can I trust this was the writer’s idea and work? Can I trust this information was fact-checked? When the answer is ‘Yes’, integrating that information (book, report, article, etc.) in our lives and businesses is easy to do. When the answer is anywhere in the area of ‘uugh...’, paralysis sets in.

The solution to these kinds of problems is to have a history and an archive of your ideas and the progress of your work: those napkin thoughts, the ugly schematics, early drafts.

As I’m working every day in Obsidian, it made sense to create a setup that will support the whole process of documentation and creation.

My system for an audit trail

An audit is a review of how an artefact of writing was created. For the audit to be meaningful, it should include date and time entries, brief explanations for each entry, and connections to other artefacts used in the process.

The tools

Because files in Obsidian are saved on your computer and aren’t locked in a database, you can work with them in other tools and in different scenarios. You can open them with mainstream office suites, or you can integrate external apps like Zotero or Raindrop to sync highlights and annotations.

In Obsidian, two plugins are useful for tracking changes: the core plugin File Recovery, and the community plugin Time Machine.
File Recovery saves the changes made to Markdown files. You can set how often it will create snapshots: the minimum is a one-minute interval. Also, you can control how long these snapshots will be saved. Duration can be set to a minimum of one day. I’ve set up mine to 1000 days (nearly three years) to see how it will behave. The Time Machine works on top of the core plugin by creating a timeline slider and a better view of the snapshot's history.

Raindrop, a bookmarks manager, comes in handy when you need to save, annotate and organise books, links, and videos during your research stage. On its paid plan, Raindrop creates a daily archive with everything you have saved. I keep a few folders for my research ideas, so I can have a clear overview of what I’m saving.

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The organisation of information

Working in Obsidian, or any other tool, can quickly get messy, leading to duplicates and misplaced notes. Add to the mix a situation when you need to recover an earlier version of your draft, and you’ll start thinking about the meaning of life...

Here’s how I try to keep order in the chaos. Every project idea lives in a dedicated folder. This way I know where to dump stuff when I’m in a rush, and I have a starting point when I return to that idea. When a project starts to make sense, I will create:

• A jottbook note- a file where I dump half-written ideas, quotes to support my article or research, fleeting notes. Inside, things are organised with date headings so I can have a progress timeline.

• A journal note- a file useful for long-term projects, like a long-form piece or a thesis. Depending on the type of project, this note will grow in complexity. You can have sections on what you have read, what quotes were useful, future tasks. You can include wiki links to sections from your jottbook note for better understanding.

• A drafts note- the actual note where the writing is happening. You can create duplicates as you edit so you can have a cleaner history of the work done.

• A subfolder where to keep the earlier versions of the work.

• A subfolder for related materials and research: images, PDFs, screenshots.

• An AI jottbook- if you use GenAI for your project, a dedicated space to have an archive of prompts, questions, and answers is necessary. And to make sure that the generated content doesn’t end up in your work.

Conclusion

Writing, reading, creating are part of what makes us human. Yeah, sounds like a cliché, but I think we need to remember it again.
Reverend Mother’s words from Herbert’s Dune are good food for thought: “Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.”

Main image via Minerva Association