On the Increasing Difficulty of Verification

When this archive began, authentication was a straightforward problem with difficult answers. A handwritten page could be dated by its paper stock, its ink, the residue of where it had been stored. A digital file carried metadata. Creation dates, device signatures, fragments of filesystem history that survived even partial corruption. The work was slow, but the methods were stable.

They are no longer stable. We note, with concern, that submissions received in the past eighteen months have increasingly included material generated by large language models trained on fragments of Rowan's published work. Some of these submissions are well-intentioned. Readers have asked an AI to "write like Rowan Black" and are uncertain what they now possess. Others are less well-intentioned. The result, in both cases, is the same: text that imitates the surface features of his voice while hollowing out the specificity that made the voice his.

We have declined to authenticate any of these submissions. Our methods have adapted accordingly. We no longer rely solely on stylistic continuity. We now seek provenance: a chain of custody for the document, a verifiable origin, a human hand somewhere in the history of its existence.

This is a loss. The archive was built on the premise that a text can outlive its origin and still be recognized. That premise holds for Rowan's actual work. It does not hold for work that is a hollow of his, assembled by a machine that has read him.

We remain at work.

The Corvids