GoKawiilAs someone who writes for a living, you would correctly guess that I’m wholeheartedly in favour of allowing AI-generated text to be detectable and marked as such. There’s just a ridiculous amount of AI slop out there, and an “AI content” label means I don’t need to waste my time reading any of it.
However, Anthropic has just announced that it’s complying with an EU initiative to have Claude watermark AI-generated text, but doing so in a particularly perverse manner …
Watermarking AI-generated images & text
Apple is already preparing its own response to the problem of AI-generated imagery through a feature known as Apple Reference Image. It’s likely the company will have to do something similar with Siri AI tools since they can be used for anything from proofreading to writing something for you.
There’s no perfect solution to this, as I mentioned last week when referring to the approach of using invisible characters to serve as watermarks.
The most eye-opening requirement in the EU initiative is that AI companies must digitally watermark text output as well as images. This can be done using invisible characters, such as the one I just used to replace the space between the words ‘invisible’ and ‘characters.’ This would survive copying and pasting, although would be very easy to defeat using optical character recognition.
Anthropic’s perverse approach
I mentioned then suggestions that Anthropic might instead take a different approach.
Some are suggesting that Anthropic may go as far as using particular language patterns in Claude output in order to allow detection even for OCRed text. I could have very much to say about this, but that’s beyond the scope of this piece.
Well, it now appears that the company is indeed doing this, so it’s time for me to have my say about it!
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