Not enough. AI generated content should be required by law to contain both visible and invisible watermarks.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Technology
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You can't enforce that with text though, because people will just delete the words. They use a subtle statistical signal because people can't just spot it and delete it. Unfortunately it raises a problem: either they have to make the signal a secret, in which case only Anthropic and those contracted to keep the secret could detect it, or it's not, in which case people can use a detector and some other AI to discover how to eliminate the signal. I expect Anthropic would try to keep control over the detection secrets and provide a detection API for third-party software to use.
Unless you're using AI to write books, I can't imagine how you'd implement some secret watermark
As I understand it, you're right that you need a good length of output to be able to detect the watermark, because only then can you see the statistical effect with confidence. And in code there are usually various options for how you get something done, and they could watermark generated code by adding a distinctive pattern to its preferences for certain constructs over others. But again, it would have to be subtle, so you'd need a large enough sample of its output before you could see the effect.
It should be fairly easy to stop this detention even in code.
You just need to set very strict "rules" the AI must follow when writing code.
Variable and method names etc. Must follow a specific formula.
Have a different AI write your docs etc.
If you're just vibe coding everything, the watermark would work. So maybe a good thing. But it'll be whack a mole, and if you're careful I'm sure you can stop the detection
I'm so silly. I saw this and thought, oh cool a teeny tiny surprising win. Guess I should only be happy with the destruction of all LLMs.
This seems a riot, trying to sneak in invisible copyright really does seem like the copyright system is well and truly fucked.
It arrived to try and help with the deluge of slop from Guttenberg nonsense but the whole idea, and copyleft, seems to be imploding at the moment.
So then they can lie and say real pictures have the watermark?
So they can lie and say fake images don't have the watermark?
So the AI looking for the watermark can hallucinate?
Yeah, I'm sure that's super reliable.
Can someone explain to me how is it possible to watermark text? Because it makes no sense to me.
Nor to me - but it doesn't make a lot of sense with images either.
Text is literally just an array of numbers (Unicode character points); where do you put "invisible" watermarks there? Images are, likewise, a three-dimensional array of pixel color values; while it's possible to very slightly vary those color values and call that "watermarking" (similar concept: steganography), how does that not get lost even unintentionally on the first lossy compression step?!
There are multiple major flaws with watermarks for texts:
- Their method only works for longer texts as it relies on statistical effects that aren't clear enough to detect in a very short text.
- They are resting their approach on an incorrect assumption: their models prefer certain words and if they appear more frequently than in a random text, they assume it's generate by their model. But who says texts are random? Out of billions of people there will be many who have a similar preference for some words and their texts will always be wrongfully accused of AI-generated just because they happen to have a similar word choice preference. The shorter the texts the likelier that issue becomes.
- There will soon be tools that replace a random amount of words with synonyms automatically and therefore remove any chances of detecting the watermark.
And who will care about those? The slop consumers will still consume...
Personally I would love a browser extension that detects these and adds a badge to AI content.
People who want to know if it is slop or not quickly?
If it's there and has been there, then there's always a chance it can be used later: