Actual humans in your neighborhood

There’s a new thing going around in the blogosphere1: human.json. The idea is quite charming: set up such a file to declare that you are human who doesn’t use LLMs to write stuff an your website. Then link to other websites of which you know the owner to be a human who doesn’t use LLMs to write stuff on their website (in their terminology this is called “vouching”). This is somewhat similar to a “human brain output” webring, in that you get a network of websites with content produced by human brains. For a person who doesn’t have their own website, you can still use this: if you know of a website authored by a human and their brain, not by an LLM, you can consider that a “seed” (in human.json terms). Meaning that, if that one of your trusted websites vouches for a website that you had not seen before, you can be reasonably certain that you’ll see something made by a human. There’s even a browser extension, so you don’t have to manually obtain the information. The full description is…