Non-AI Verified: How the Writing Record and Badge Work

Contests, producers and teachers want to know whether a script was written by a person, and nobody can tell from the finished pages. What can be shown is how the words arrived. While you write, EnsembleWriter keeps a record of how every part of your script reached the page: typed, pasted or imported. Turn on the Non-AI Verified badge and the PDFs you export link to a signed copy of that record that anyone can open. It is free on every plan and needs a free account.

What the Record Shows

Every stretch of text in a script carries one of five labels, attached the moment it arrives:

• Typed in EnsembleWriter: entered in the editor, by keyboard, dictation or autocorrect.
• Pasted: pasted in from somewhere other than this script. A writing or grammar tool that rewrites a long passage in place counts as pasted too.
• Imported: from a file you imported or a sample script.
• Unverified: text our servers did not watch arrive, such as edits made offline, a script written while signed out and saved to an account later, or an older version you restored.
• Before tracking began: already in the script when the record started.

Moving your own text around keeps its label. Cut a scene and paste it somewhere else in the same script and it is still typed; undo and redo keep labels as well. Scenes you bring back from a private draft keep the labels they had in the draft.

Beside the labels, the record counts active writing time (a minute for each writer who edited the script in that minute) and how many people wrote in it. It never records who they are.

Finding the Record

Open a script and look at the bottom of the right sidebar. The Non-AI Verified card shows how much of the script was typed in EnsembleWriter and whether the badge is on. Click it to see the full record: the share of each label, active writing time, the number of writers and the date tracking started.

Signed out, the card is greyed out, because the record is kept by our servers and needs an account. A private draft has no card and never carries the badge. The scenes you bring back from it are part of the script's record from then on.

Turning On the Badge

In the record, switch on Show the badge. It saves straight away. The badge is on for new scripts and off for scripts created before the record existed, and only the script's owner can change it. Co-writers see the switch but cannot flip it.

The record is kept whether the badge is on or off. The switch only decides whether readers see it.

What Readers See

With the badge on:

• Every PDF you export while signed in gets a small QR code and a short address at the bottom of its title page, below your contact details.
• The script's share link page gets a link to the same record.

Both open a public certificate page with the script's title, page count, the share of each label, active writing time, the number of writers, when the record started and a fingerprint of the text. Nobody needs an account to read it. Fountain and EnsembleWriter file exports do not carry the badge.

One Certificate per Version

A certificate covers one exact version of the script, identified by a SHA-256 fingerprint of its text. Export the same text twice and both PDFs point to the same certificate. Change a comma and the next export gets a new one. Old certificates are never changed, so a PDF you sent last month still opens the record for the version it was made from.

Checking a Certificate

Each certificate is signed with Ed25519 when it is issued. A technical reader does not have to trust the page: the Download the signed certificate link gives the record and its signature as JSON, and EnsembleWriter's public keys are published at /.well-known/ensemble-certificate-keys.json. Any standard Ed25519 library can check one against the other, and a certificate that has been altered fails the check.

What It Does Not Prove

The record shows how the text reached EnsembleWriter. It does not show who thought of the words. Someone could type in text that came from somewhere else and it would count as typed, and the labels come from the writer's own editor. The certificate page says this too, so a reader is never told more than the record can support. Read it as a record of how a script was written, not as proof of authorship.

Privacy

A certificate page never shows anyone's name or email address, or any of the script's text. Certificate pages are kept out of search engines and their addresses cannot be guessed, so only people you give a PDF or a share link to will find one. Deleting a script deletes its record and every certificate issued for it. See the privacy policy for the details.