Proving presence, and absence in an age of imitation Photo on jarmoluk The more AI advances, the more fragile digital proof becomes. Face recognition, fingerprints, voiceprints. Biometric authentication has become the standard for verifying identity. It feels more secure than a string of passwords. But when I ask myself — will this still hold ten years from now? — I’m not so sure. Generative AI keeps improving. Creating images and video based on a specific person’s data is no longer out of reach. Deepfakes, 3D printing — even an amateur like me can think of ways to fool a biometric system. As AI evolves, the parts of us that can be expressed as data become easier to replicate. Which means the digital wall, relatively speaking, gets thinner. So what remains? I arrived at a somewhat unexpected answer. The analog. Take handwriting. A page written ten years ago, and a page written yesterday. The shift in content, the aging of the paper itself — these are not things AI can easily reproduce on demand. A diary goes even further. Emotional ideas, contradictions, the mood of a particular afternoon. Details that even the writer has forgotten. All of it preserved, imperfectly, in ink. The act of writing by hand is itself a form of proof. Not typing — but pulling what’s inside your head out through your fingers, onto paper. Inefficient. Inconvenient. Irreplaceable. People change. Materials degrade. AI can learn my handwriting as it is today. But it cannot predict how my handwriting will change over the next ten years. Because deterioration and growth are byproducts of lived time — not something that can be generated in advance. Digital data can be copied perfectly. But something that changes with the passage of time cannot be perfectly copied. Maybe what proves we are who we are lives on the opposite side of efficiency. Slow. Imperfect. Degrading. That is precisely where AI cannot yet follow. And for now, that might be enough. Engineer. AI thinker. I write from the intersection of systems and humanity. If you’re looking to sharpen your company’s philosophy or vision — making it more structured, compelling, and articulate — I’d love to work with you: hiro.Oohashi@proton.me For more personal essays and behind-the-scenes thinking, find me on Substack: https://substack.com/@hiroo1 How Do You Prove You’re You, After AI Has Evolved? was originally published in Artificial Intelligence in Plain English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.