iA Writer 7 (ia.net)

> With iA Writer 7 you can manually mark ChatGPT’s contributions as AI text. AI text is greyed out. This allows you to separate and control what you borrow and what you type. By splitting what you type and what you pasted, you can make sure that you speak your mind with your voice, rhythm and tone.

Their approach is very cautious and a welcome alternative to the AI hype. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399114

Good in principle, but bad in the implementation.

From their Markdown Annotations specs [0], the authorship is recorded in a quasi-YAML block at the end of the file, e.g.,—

    Annotations: 0,95 SHA-256 1132bf5e376a605f5beed4b204456114  
    @Human: 0,20 33,4 45,6 62,4  
    &AI: 20,13 37,8 51,11 66,29  

The format is bad for multiple reasons:

1. it doesn’t work with the existing de facto standard for markdown metadata, i.e., the YAML frontmatters; the markdown standard is already too fractured to have a new extension;

2. it messes with types by using YAML strings for arrays and integers;

3. it’s inefficient — any change in the file would demand iterating through all recorded ranges and updating the offsets.

I’d prefer it to adopt the YAML frontmatters:

  authorship:
    authors:
      - {id: 0, name: Human, hash: xxxxxxxx}
      - {id: 1, name: AI}
    ranges: # adding ids to help resolve potential conflicts
      - {id: 0, author: Human, begin: 0, len: 20}
      - {id: 1, author: AI, begin: 20, len: 13}

[0]: https://github.com/iainc/Markdown-Annotations