25-03-2025
Why A Rocket Scientist Built An AI-Free Certification
A new AI-Free Certification service enables writers, artists and creatives to "brand" their work as ... More human-created content.
Seth Jaffe started his career as an aerospace engineer and landed a job at NASA where he was, well, a rocket scientist — so he's always been pretty smart. He's also always been pretty creative as a photographer and book author.
"I like to write science fiction books. It's one of my hobbies," he explained during a Zoom call.
"I have all these books, and I thought, 'You know what? Later in my career, I'm going to publish these books.' But then I came across an article where someone used AI to generate a children's novel, including all the illustrations. And I thought, 'Great, just as I come to market, someone else can use AI to create a similar book in minutes.''
Lucky for Jaffe, later in his career he also became a corporate intellectual property attorney. As he recognized the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence across creative and artistic ventures – he saw a need to help creators, artists and writers classify their unique human-made work as separate from AI-generated content.
Jaffe recently launched AI-Free Certification, an online repository and certification archive that seeks to establish a new standard for human creativity and ingenuity in a time when AI-generated books, artwork and music flood the market.
The rise of generative AI and its rapidly improving artistic abilities makes it tricky for most of us to tell the difference between AI-created content and authentic creative outputs from humans. Multimodal AI solutions such as Sora, ChatGPT and Midjourney quickly churn out videos, text and still images that are as good as those created by a human.
Jaffe says while AI has tremendous brainstorming and production capabilities, human creators who rely solely on their own ingenuity needed a way to distinguish and 'brand' their work.
"You may spend 30 minutes writing a single sentence," Jaffe says. "I wanted to showcase that my book was not done with AI. And as an intellectual property attorney, I'm familiar with trademarks. There's something called a certification mark, like ENERGY STAR or Underwriters Laboratories, which shows the nature and quality of something rather than its origin. That's when it clicked — AI-Free Certification could be a great use of a certification mark.'
Jaffe said his AI-Free Certification is based on the honor system, where humans describe the amount of AI used — if at all — in a particular creation. For a piece to be eligible to receive the 'AI-Free' badge and be listed on the website, it must have been created without AI assistance or with only permissible AI use, such as minor formatting suggestions or spell checking.
Jaffe says those types of automated tweaks are allowed since they predated generative AI by decades as part of word processing and image editing software.
Once that content is uploaded to the AI-Free Certification server, the digital badge is generated and can be added to the creative piece signaling the author's pledge of human authenticity.
When I uploaded my own piece of content to the AI-Free Certification platform, the following unique 'AI-Free' badge was generated. The distinct QR code connects directly to the archived AI-Free piece of content. Each document is also assigned a custom certificate number — for the document represented below, the unique certificate number is #3770.
Customized QR Code badge with unique certificate number for eligible AI-Free content.
Document creators can also download an actual certificate that can be added to physical files or stored at a real-world location.
The AI-Free digital certificate contains a custom QR Code the links directly to the archived ... More document, the date of issuance, content title and author name as well as the piece's unique certificate number.
Jaffe is quick to point out that certification is not verification.
"A lot of people ask, 'How do you verify that the work was created without AI?' And my response is, well, you really can't these days. It won't be long — if not already — before AI can defeat detection systems. So, we base it on the honor code, just like the U.S. Copyright Office does. We're not here to catch cheaters. We're here to allow artists to represent to the world that their work was created without impermissible AI use,' he explains.
While it might no be a perfect step at this stage, it's definitely a first step in the right direction toward empowering creatives and consumers with a tool to distinguish between AI and human produced content.
'The goal here is to support artists. I'm a writer. I've been a professional photographer. I want to make it easy for artists to showcase their human ingenuity,' he said.
Jaffe added that his certification solution has gained interest and attention from a number of creative professionals who want to protect their work. He envisions expanding the service's reach through collaborations with creative guilds, professional organizations and schools.
"If we can get people interested in the arts at a young age and give them a way to showcase that they did it themselves, that's a win. I also want to partner with writing associations, music associations and film organizations," he added.
He also sees the strong possibility that his certification platform can upgrade and expand in the future. Jaffe says a natural progression would include some type of blockchain layer to provide an immutable record of authorship as well as a premium verification service that could include a group of human examiners — much like a patent examiner — who reviews submissions providing a deeper level of authentication.
But Jaffe recognizes the challenges of creating a full-proof, AI-free verification service.
"The more I look at what AI is doing, the more I'm convinced that verifying AI-free work is going to be extremely difficult. AI is advancing so fast that it's nearly impossible to tell. But we're gauging interest in a more hands-on verification process,' he said.
As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, the value of human-created work may increase according to Jaffe. He says human creativity will ultimately find its place alongside AI, rather than being replaced by it.
'Think about vinyl. It was the gold standard, then cassette tapes came along, then CDs. But vinyl is back because people appreciate its uniqueness. I think AI will take over certain areas, but human ingenuity will come back when people realize that originality has value. In my mind, the fact that something was created by a human will become a key part of its value,' he concluded.
