Cryptographic provenance for the written word
Prove which words are yours.
Worlds is the first authoring platform that lets you sign every paragraph you write — a per-author, per-paragraph cryptographic stamp anyone can verify offline.
The problem
AI made authorship illegible.
Watermarking AI output is a defensive crouch — it asks the wrong question. The right question is the inverse: how do humans prove their contribution? Not with a label. With a signature only the author can produce.
In a recent experiment, a working novelist asked her closest readers — including a friend of three decades — to tell her own pages apart from AI imitations trained on her previous books. None of them could. Style alone is not evidence anymore. The forensic burden has moved to the cryptographic record.
What you get
One signet per author.
Your signet is a 32-byte Ed25519 public key, fingerprinted to a single hex prefix. It travels with every paragraph you sign. Anyone with the manuscript and your sidecar can verify the words came from you — without contacting Worlds.
The cryptography is the trust. Worlds is one of N validators of any signed manuscript; the verifier is open-source.
98890daf3b56765f…fb70cd81HUMAN-ORIGINALd08cc6177e72671e…f3408b6951e5115c72fe897a…2af01✓ VALIDHow it works
Three steps. All offline-verifiable.
- 1
Sign on device.
Your private key never leaves your machine. Each paragraph is hashed (SHA-256) and signed (Ed25519, RFC 8032). Determinism is the point — the same paragraph signed twice produces identical bytes.
- 2
Append to a Merkle log.
Every signed paragraph becomes a leaf in an RFC 6962-style binary Merkle tree. The Worlds audit key signs the root. No blockchain, no on-chain anchoring — climate-credible by construction.
- 3
Ship a sidecar.
Exported alongside the manuscript: a self-contained sidecar.provenance.json with every signature and inclusion proof. A reader runs the open verifier — no Worlds account required — and gets a clean per-paragraph human/AI breakdown.
Open by design
The spec is the contract.
Anything Worlds signs, anyone can verify — using our verifier, a community implementation, or one they write themselves from the spec.
CC BY 4.0
Specification v1
Full byte-level spec for the provenance sidecar. Conformance procedure with 24 byte-equality checks.
JSON, deterministic
Test vectors
Pinned author + audit keypair, 5 records covering all author types, every expected intermediate. A conformant implementation reproduces it byte-for-byte.
MIT licensed
Reference verifier
Open-source CLI. Verifies a manuscript + sidecar offline. 8/8 tests passing on Node 22+. GitHub release with Phase F.
GitHub release pending
What it isn't
- Not blockchain.
- Off-chain Merkle log via Postgres. ~1,000,000× more energy-efficient than Bitcoin anchoring; ~1,000× cheaper than Ethereum PoS.
- Not a watermark.
- Watermarks live inside generated text. A signet lives outside it — separately verifiable, cryptographically tamper-evident.
- Not an AI detector.
- Detectors are probabilistic and adversarial. Signatures are math. Either the bytes verify or they don't.
- Not a publishing platform.
- Worlds is the workspace. The signet rides every export — KDP, Substack, print + QR, your own newsletter — without needing the rest of Worlds to verify.
Status, honestly
Cohort testing.
The cryptographic core ships and is tamper-tested. Voice calibration is in small-cohort validation — we're measuring whether AI-assisted drafts in your voice pass a blind test against your own writing at ≥80% accuracy across ≥5 authors. Public access opens when the cohort gate clears.
If you write long-form non-fiction and want a seat in the next cohort — sign up and tell us about your work.