concept
Chad's name for the period after ChatGPT's release in late 2022, when no text can be assumed to be wholly human-written. In episode 01 it explains the frontier labs' hunger for verified human text and Syntopic's interest in verified human speech. Episode 01, at about 35 minutes.
Across the episodes
01
Enters as the historical break that makes provenance a necessity rather than a nicety
Dates the break: texts from before the end of 2022 carry an assumption of human authorship that later texts lose.
"AI epoch or the LLM epoch. After 2022, you don't know whether a book or a text was completely written by a human."Chad Nantais, Syntopic, Episode 1 (11 Oct 2026), 35:13
Spells out the three ways a text can now be touched by a model, written, edited, or elaborated, which makes authorship a question to be documented.
"we're in the post-epoch now. Now we don't know if something was indeed written by a human or edited by an LLM or elaborated on by an LLM."Chad Nantais, Syntopic, Episode 1 (11 Oct 2026), 38:09
Connections
raises the stakes ofProvenance
After the break, authorship needs receipts.