Proof of Human Authorship - Tales of Ai Horror and the Unknown - Keystroke Data and provenance -9781997067177 - 9781997999492 9781997999782

Copyright © 2025-2026 by Alexander Paul Burton Third Revised Edition - Edited September 2026 Ebook ISBN: 9781997999782 Hardcover ISBN: 9781997999492 3rd Ed. Paperback ISBN: 9781997067177 This book began on 2 November 2025, the day after Hallowe'en, at my desk in Toronto, and it was finished on 25 September 2026. In the 327 days between, the combined manuscript recorded over forty thousand individual changes: nearly thirty-three thousand insertions, six and a half thousand deletions, and almost five hundred passes spent on nothing more glamorous than formatting. Those numbers only tell part of the story, though. Many of the tales here, including the Hugh McElroy saga that grew from Thames to Titanic, began life as their own separate and much longer documents, drafted, cut, rewritten and occasionally abandoned before they were stitched together into the book you're holding. There were pauses too, the longest nearly five months, when the stories were left to rest and I went off to row, play the piano and live a little, before coming back to them with fresh eyes. Aly appears 507 times, Finn 479, and the word "rowing" 92, which will surprise nobody who knows me. Every recorded contribution to this manuscript is mine, written in Google Docs and logged through Process Feedback, and it sits alongside the provenance record I keep for all my books through ORCID, ISNI and my Authors Guild membership. In the final revision stage, I used Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, as an editorial sounding board: to check grammar and continuity, suggest where tension could build, and help draft a number of expanded passages and the fictional app screens, all of which I reviewed, edited and chose whether to keep. It felt fitting for a collection about technology creeping into our most private lives to be honest about where it crept into mine. The characters, the world of Silverbourne, the ghosts, the rowers and every decision about what stayed on the page were human ones, and I hope you can feel that in every chapter.