Yikes on bikes. Let’s talk about it.

Here’s who I am:

I’m Sarah Day. I’m a technical writer who manages a documentation team. I am professionally and academically trained in how best to make content that people can read, understand, and use from a screen. This has been my entire rent-making, mortgage-paying job since 2009. I am very good at it.

I’m also an artist. I write books, one of which was stolen by Anthropic. I publish short fiction, primarily on the internet. I’m very online.

It’s impossible for me not to be aware of AI “art” (lmao), and impossible not to think about what it means to be a creative on the internet in 2026. The tools we use to make art translate between the creator, the one who imagines, and the audience, the one who receives. Generative AI tools exist in that translative space, but as a lens that distorts instead of clarifying. 

I don’t use generative AI in my work. I’m not interested in tools that do what generative AI does for the same reason I’m not interested in paying someone else to go to the gym for me. I’m not particularly afraid of the consequences of being accused of using generative AI in my work, because when I sit down to make art I know what I came here to do, and it’s not stick a prompt into the internet’s glory hole and wait for satisfaction.

And should the need arise, I have a pretty good paper trail.

Here’s who you are:

You’re a writer, or other text-making creative who doesn’t use AI to develop your work (because you respect your audience, your creative process, and yourself). You wrote a book and you’re trying to sell it (or maybe you self-published it) and now you’re worried someone will ask you for evidence that your book was entirely human-made. Or worse, someone has accused you of using AI to develop your work. You know you didn’t use AI to write anything, but you’re not sure how to establish your credibility.

So let’s talk about how to do that.

The first thing to say here is that I think you should worry about this problem as little as possible.  The number of us who will be tasked to provide a chain of custody for every draft we’ve ever written is staggeringly small. (If you’re reading this and you’re one of those people, I’m sorry this was the resource you found. You probably need a lawyer.) Instead, I’m going to suggest that maybe you, gentle reader, are worried about the bad opinions of people reading your stuff and wondering if you used AI to make it. Perhaps you are worried about the court of public opinion, going viral (negative) on Bookstagram, or otherwise having a bunch of strangers be mean to you on the internet. And I have great/terrible news for you:

No amount of documentation will reverse a bad faith read.

If someone has decided you used generative AI in your work and they have a motivation to keep believing that (you’ve used generative AI before, even if you didn’t this time; the reader doesn’t like your work but lacks the skill to articulate why and has decided their dislike must be because you used AI and not for some reason as flimsy and subjective as their taste; the reader just plain doesn’t like you, etc.), you will not be able to convince them otherwise. 

People believe the things they want to believe and apply those beliefs with a broad brush. This is especially true on the internet, where so much critique and discourse takes place in the relatively lawless territory of social media, in public comments sections, or otherwise before the eyes of peers and strangers, real or imagined.

My advice here is not to try to make it so no one dislikes you or your work and therefore no one is ever mean to you. It’s to make decisions about how you handle this stuff in advance, so that if accusations arise, you can stand behind your integrity, say fuck the haters, and move on.

The most important thing you can do is have timestamped versions of your work. That’s versions, plural—one for every writing session, if you can swing it. It’s no longer sufficient to have a rough draft, a submission draft, and a published draft. The more discrete drafts of your work you can save, the easier it will be for you to establish that a paragraph, phrase, name, or concept originated in your brain, not a computer’s.

The exception to this practice is if you’re only creating things by hand, not on a computer—but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Here are some options for establishing the humanity of your work, ranked in rough order by what I personally believe to be hardest to easiest.

Write all your shit by hand

This suggestion feels ridiculous to me and I would never do it. I used to write everything by hand, but I type almost as fast as I think now. Writing by hand feels perilously slow. (I’m also going to be 40 in October and no longer have the ligaments to keep the word count up if I’m writing everything by hand.)

Probably if you’re writing things by hand, you’re not going to have a million copies of the same work to refer back to. Instead, you’ll have to rely on the literal physical age of your notebook, and how much time it takes most of us to fill a notebook, to stand in those many versions’ stead.

The thing to worry about if you write by hand is losing your notebook—but if you take a picture of every page and back up your photos (to a secure, private location that doesn’t train AI off your images), you’ve got every draft you’ve ever written. Someday those timestamped photos may help establish your credibility, too.

Change formats between drafts

Every time I finish the first draft of a book, I print the whole thing out, mark it up with a pen in one color, and then open the file, make the changes I marked with pen 1, and then cross those marks off in the physical draft with pen 2, which is a different color. By the time I’m done, I have a legible first draft printout with a clear chain of steps that turned that first draft into the second draft. I could mail that marked first draft of my most recent book to an editor tomorrow if I needed to.

You can do this too—either by physically printing the draft out, or by saving a copy with track changes and comments enabled, or by marking it up as a PDF or on an e-ink tablet instead of by hand.

Use paywalls

If you don’t want to use cloud storage or email, you can set up a Patreon or paywalled newsletter to hold your drafts. As of this writing, paywalls have the additional bonus of being pretty impenetrable to AI, so you don’t have to worry as much about your work being scraped as if you save it in Google Drive or similar. Recently, Patreon’s CEO said that all Patreon posts will block AI scraping at the network level, which is a nice competitive differentiator in Times Like These.

If you’re not a self-publishing kind of person and want to sell the work you’re posting to publications or presses later on, consider the downstream consequences of this option. Many publications consider work that has appeared in a newsletter or on a Patreon to be a form of publication and won’t want to pay you original story dollars for it.

Email your drafts to yourself (then save the email)

If you’re writing with a word processor, make it your end-of-writing-session ritual to save that document, attach it to an email, and email it to yourself. When you get the email, archive it somewhere in your email client, or label all emails of that nature ‘cover-my-ass’. Those emails are dated, timestamped records of what a file looked like however many days, weeks, or months ago. You can forward that email to anyone, anytime.

Why would you do this rather than just writing in Google Drive or another cloud-based service that saves all your work automatically? Because you can access cloud-based editors from multiple devices, it can be hard to tell when a file was most recently edited—especially when you have to open the file (which some services count as an ‘edit’) to do things like export or download it.

Automatic backups and secure cloud storage

This is by far the easiest, dead-stupid-simplest way to catalog your work. It takes a little money and a very little technical know-how to set up, but once configured it pretty much runs automatically and usually doesn’t need any maintenance.

1. Find the automatic backup tool of your choice. 

2. Buy a subscription or start a free trial if you’re on the fence about what to use. 

3. Set the automatic backup tool to watch the directory where you keep your work. 

4. Set the automatic backup tool to automatically back up the directory every time something changes, or once a day, or whatever best fits your workflow.

5. Test it to make sure it works.

6. If it does, continue living your life.

I use Backblaze. This is not a recommendation—I heard about it on a podcast and it worked fine when I tested it. It’s got a janky, dated UI and terrible UX (“What even is a status bar?” —the Backblaze dev team, probably), but the backup and restore function work just fine. I’m ambivalent about this tool and might switch to something else when my subscription lapses. 

Backblaze does require that you back up to its data centers, rather than a cloud storage provider, but I’m okay with that (if I wasn’t, I would find an automatic backup solution that integrated with Proton Drive).

Okay, that’s what I’ve got. It’s not rocket science: save multiple versions of your work, automate saving them if you can, and save them in different formats or places.

Also, while I still have your attention: use a password manager.