Claude watermarks your code now
926 segments
One of the most frustrating things about
AI is that it's hard to know if someone
used it or not. Sure, there's all the
common tells like the M dashes and the
you're absolutely right and the it's not
X, it's Y's and all these types of
patterns, but it's generally pretty hard
to actually know if a given piece of
text or line of code was really written
with AI. And this has scared a lot of
people and for reasons that are good. If
it's impossible to know what text was
written with AI and what was written by
a human, the world will devolve into a
pile of slop really, really fast. The
European Union agrees and that's why
they just introduced the AI act which
has a specific goal of making it easier
to know and label AI generated media and
text and anthropic is complying with it.
Normally these types of watermarks are
things that only apply to media gen
things like images, videos, audio, etc.
because there's a lot of data there
that's relatively easy to sneak
watermarks into. But when it comes to
text, it's a lot harder. Which is why
it's pretty crazy that Anthropics
already updated their docs on this,
saying that they plan to do marking of
all AI generated content across all
platforms. Cloud models launched in the
EU on or after August 2nd, 2026 will
support machine readable markings at
launch. Generated text will carry
embedded watermarks and generated files
will include digitally signed Providence
metadata where supported. Oh boy. This
means our friends at Anthropic will be
marking not just the text they output,
but the code they output as well. This
is a very scary change and I have a
feeling it's not going to do what is
intended. As always, there's a lot of
layers to this one from the relatively
good intent of this EU act to the
questionable implementations we're going
to be seeing all across the field and
also the impact this will have on us
actually using the models. I'll talk
about all of that, the workarounds, and
more after a real quick break for
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The best place to start on this chaos is
probably the official code that the EU
has put out. This is the code of
practice on transparency of AI generated
content. There's two different sections
in this code. There's section one for
the providers which is rules for marking
and detection of AI generated and
manipulated content and section two is
for deployers rules for labeling of deep
fakes and AI generated and manipulated
text. This code was drawn up by
independent experts in a
multistakeholder process facilitated by
the AI office of the EU. It helps
providers and deployers of generative AI
systems to comply with the AI acts
obligations for labeling and marking of
AI generated content. Even though
adherence to the code is voluntary, the
transparency requirements under article
50 are legal obligations. AI needs to be
deployed in ways where users know
they're talking to AI. That is totally
fair. Providers of AI systems generation
shall ensure the outputs of AI systems
are marked in a machine readable format
in detectable as artificially generated
or manipulated. The inclusion of text
content here is a bit concerning.
Providers shall ensure that their
technical solutions are effective,
interoperable, robust, and reliable as
far as this is technically feasible,
taking into account the specificities
and limitations of various types of
content, the costs of implementation,
and the generally acknowledged
state-of-the-art as may be reflected in
relevant technical standards. So, this
is the only section that is obligatory
for companies in this ruling. The rest
of the code is more suggestions. But
that one piece there, that uh section
two here, the providers must ensure that
outputs are marked in a machine readable
format. That's where this all starts to
become a show. There's an
interesting call at the end here of the
section two. This obligation shall not
apply to the extent the AI systems
perform an assistive function for
standard editing or do not substantially
alter the input data provided by the
deployer of semantics thereof or where
authorized by the law to detect,
prevent, investigate or prosecute
criminal offenses. What this means is if
you have an AI system that is like
editing or autocorrecting or things for
existing documents, images, whatever,
that does not need to have the same
level of like transparency and encoded
metadata proving that it was AI. So if I
use AI to like do a small correction
like to remove a zit from my face, that
doesn't need to be marked the same way.
If I'm writing an essay and I ask for
the agent to find little things that I
could improve in the essay or like clean
up the grammar and stuff, it doesn't
need to apply the same way there. But
the actual output from the LLM, it does.
Very interesting. And with that, we now
need to talk a little bit more about
watermarks. Going to start from a weird
point. So, hear me out. This image could
be AI generated. It might not be. It's
hard to know for sure. I don't know
where this image would have been taken,
but Maria posted it online on Twitter a
few days ago. In fact, when Maria posted
it, there was no marking here that said
it was generated with AI. So, clearly
this photo is real, right? Let me go a
step further. These two images are the
same, right? Like obviously these are
the exact same image with no differences
between them. What if I told you there
was not a single bite shared between
these two images? One of these is a PNG
and the other is a JPEG. This is what
makes watermarking for media both really
easy and really hard. That image we were
just looking at, it's not huge, but it's
not small either. It's 623
kilob. And the relationship between the
size of the file and what we see not
that simple. When you have this much
data in a file, there's a lot of room to
stuff things into it. a lot of which
won't even be perceivable to humans.
Let's say I want to add some special
encoding to make sure that I know this
image is the one I have here on my
computer. I could put it in the image
metadata and things like that, but I
want it to be harder to get rid of.
Let's just zoom into some of the like
noise and the gradient here and pick a
corner. Let's say let's just start from
the top left. Why not? I'll take a
random color from here. We'll take this
darker purple. And now I'm going to put
in a little encoding. I'm T3. So what
we'll do is every three dots I will fill
one with this darker color. One, two,
three. Do it. One, two, three. Do it.
One, two, three. Do it. Okay. I just
added a marking on this image in the top
left corner where I changed one of the
colors in specific pixels every three
pixels. So three are left normal, then
one I change it slightly. Can you tell
any difference in this image? If you
think you can, you're lying because the
compression in the video will not allow
such a thing. And this is me changing
the pixel to a civic color. So, we do
three normal, one change, three normal,
one changed, but I was changing it to a
fixed color. Imagine we get a little
sneakier with it. Imagine instead we
take the color of a given pixel here and
we knock it down or up one in any of the
different spectrums you have control of
with color because you have RGB values
or HSL and you can change any of these
at any point to or from anything. So we
could have a pattern where every four
pixels we bump one of these by one and
it wouldn't change anything visually for
any normal person. If we just go from 30
to 31 every four pixels, that is
relatively easy to encode in an image.
And it's in a way that will not be
noticeable to any human, but does
accurately with the actual pixels encode
real data. But in order for that type of
granular encoding to work where every
four pixels we go up or down one value,
we need to make sure we don't lose the
pixel values. And it turns out the
compression we use for media is directly
in opposition of the types of watermarks
we're talking about here. One of the
things most image compression algorithms
will do is they take areas where colors
are similar and they flatten them to be
the same so you don't have to encode as
much data. It'll take a grid every four
pixels and say okay these four have
these colors and these brightness
levels. Can we normalize that so we only
have to encode it once instead of four
times? That means that if we have this
pattern where every four pixels we
change the color slightly, that's going
to be flattened by pretty much every
compression algorithm ever. And all you
have to do to kill the watermark is turn
your PNG into a JPEG. It is seriously
that easy. And I have been able to evade
pretty much every single fancy type of
media detection algorithm for generated
AI image detection with something as
simple as reexporting as a JPEG or just
increasing the compression or scale the
image up and then back down. There's a
lot of little things you can do that
just destroy these watermarking
techniques. And the real reason is this
here. There is so much data available
here that leaving watermarks in it is
easy. But all the algorithms are
optimizing for what humans actually see.
And the difference between what data
exists and what humans perceive is the
problem here. With something like an
image, there's a wide range of data that
can be changed before a human notices a
difference. This means it's easy to
embed this type of metadata in an image,
but it's also hard to do it in a
resilient way because the compression
algorithms are working around this fact
that humans are bad at seeing the actual
ones and zeros in the bites. So there's
a lot of hacks we can do to compress the
files in order to save storage, but it
also in that process would kill a lot of
these hidden pieces of metadata. This is
why many people who post their AI
generated images on X get tagged because
they're just copy pasting the image
straight from chat GPT. And when you
copy from chat GPT or Gemini or wherever
else, they have these IDs in them.
Google's went as far as creating this
whole synth ID platform, which is a tool
that watermarks and identifies AI
generated content, mostly images, video
stuff that they've been talking about
forever. And no matter how hard I push
them, they will not let me in. And I
only get like three test runs a day
using the official Gemini site. Synth
ID's tagging is hilariously simple. They
apply this noise pattern on top of the
image. GBT image 2 has a similar one
where this pattern gets applied on top
and it looks that same deep fried way
that GPT images look. I'm not sure if
this is the entirety of how they do this
check and how they do these tests, but I
would guess it is a significant portion
of it. These patterns are what are being
used for a lot of the identification.
And again, the right compression, the
right application, the right layers
added to it, a very very slight filter
even, which is trivial for me to add. If
I just go here, filter, I can do like
the slightest sharpening pass where I
add like a 1% sharpen.
no perceivable difference. But now every
single bite in this image has been
re-encoded and any patterns that were
applied on top are fully destroyed. I
can even demo that trivially by copying
the noise pattern and then doing a quick
anything with this. If I apply that 1%
sharpen doesn't look any different, but
the bites that they're actually looking
for here have just changed entirely. If
I zoom in real deep and show you
see that you can literally see the
difference with like 2%. And I'm going
to apply. Now it's a very subtle change.
Zero is nothing. And then five. You can
see a slight change too. This is for
like a visible noise pattern. Any of
these are indetectable to humans. None
of them are indetectable to AI. Like any
one of those changes will entirely
destroy the patterns it's looking for
here. It's so easy to kill these things.
It's hilarious. It's even easier if
you're okay with a slightly blurriier
image or you do the lazy thing, which is
to resize the canvas and see how the
pattern got way blurrier. How do you
think that will work if it's also
applied at 1% opacity on top of
something else? Trivial to destroy these
patterns. There's no world in which they
will persist well across any of these
types of things, especially if you apply
them the way they're actually applied
IRL, which is something like this. You
have it on the image as like a 0.1%
opacity, maybe 1%. Yeah, you don't see
any difference here. And if I blur,
unblur, resize, or do anything like
that, the pattern gets destroyed very
fast. You could even do the stupidest
possible thing, which is to just take
that original image and do that with it.
I just change where every pixel lands
just by shortening it slightly. It's so
easy to kill these types of watermarks
just because there's so much wiggle room
in the data. When you have 623
kilobytes, I can delete random and
no human will notice, but the computers
no longer have access to that pattern.
All of this is to say this image is
clearly real and we would have no way to
know otherwise. So again, the problem is
this gap between the amount of data and
what humans perceive. And when you have
images that are millions of bits, it's
easy to flip things around in all
directions. But what happens when you go
from 623 kilobytes to I don't know 10
bytes. Each of these bytes is a letter
or a chunk for a word. Like once you're
responding with plain text that is
small, your ability to hide things in it
and also transform it goes down
massively. If I have a four pixel image
and I change one pixel, you can tell. If
I have a 4 million pixel image and I
change one pixel, you can't tell. If I
have a whole book and I change one word,
you're not going to be able to tell. But
if I have one sentence and I change a
word, you can absolutely tell. And
that's where this new text watermarking
comes in. I already read this section
about how Anthropic is going to be
following the rules. They simply call
out that the marks are going to work
everywhere that Claude is used, whether
that is through the API on the platform,
Claude, Claude Code, Claude Co-work, and
Claude tag. They also want to help us
detect Claude's marks, too. They'll
support users and other third parties to
detect Claude's marks as the code
requires. We'll share details in
forthcoming documentation. They are
actually planning on adding marking to
their old models as well, which is
interesting to me too. As AI generated
content becomes commonplace, greater
transparency and signals about where
content comes from can give people
useful context about the information
they consume. Support transparency and
comply with our legal obligations.
Anthropic is working to include machine
readable marks in content that Claude
generates. Embedded watermarks will
apply to all generated text and
Providence metadata will apply where
Claude supports processing files. This
will work with all the cloud platforms
too. Whether you're hosting on AWS,
Google Cloud or Foundry. So let's see
how they actually will be marking the
content. Cloud uses two complimentary
techniques to mark content generated and
processed by AI or by cloud
specifically. Watermarks embedded in
text and signed providence metadata
attached to files. First we have the
text embeds. When a supported cloud
model generates text, it weaves an
imperceptible watermark directly into
the text itself. You won't see it. It
doesn't change the meaning, quality, or
readability of clause responses. Because
the watermark is part of the text, it
will travel with the text when it's
copied and pasted elsewhere and may
persist through some editing.
Watermarking will be applied at the
model level, which means it will be
present no matter which cloud product or
surface the text comes from. This is a
very interesting call out specifically
may persist through some editing. Then
there's the signed providence metadata
which is that when they touch or create
things like SVGs, PGs or JPEGs, it will
provide signed providence metadata.
Metadata follows the coalition for
content providence and authenticity. The
CGPA open standard which is used across
the industry to record information about
content providence. If the metadata is
present, it signals that a file was
processed with claude and lets you
detect whether the file has been
tampered with. Thankfully, they call out
limitations underneath here. Detected
mark provides a signal that content was
processed by Claude, but it's not fully
conclusive. Detecting a Claude mark
tells you that content may have been
processed by Claude. It does not on its
own confirm the full providence of the
content. For example, Claude may not be
the original author because people often
use Claude to proofread, translate,
summarize, or convert files. The output
can carry a Claude mark even if the
underlying ideas, text, or data
originated from another source. The
content also may have been changed after
Claude processed it. Mark content may be
modified, exerted, or combined with
other materials after Claude is
processed. There's also the fact that a
lack of a detected mark doesn't mean the
content wasn't AI generated or
processed. There's also the fact that it
doesn't mean anything if it says no, we
didn't process that because there's so
many cases where it won't flag. Like if
the model generated text before this was
a thing, if the text has been heavily
edited, paraphrased, translated, or
mixed into other writing. If the passage
was too short, so there wasn't enough
text to encode a watermark. And for the
file stuff, if the file's been
converted, resaved, screenshotted, or
other things, again, the examples I was
giving here, then it won't work. And if
it was produced through a platform
feature or file type where a particular
marking type wasn't supported, very,
very fun. The harsh reality here is that
this is only ever going to catch the
lowest effort people because if you just
copy paste the text straight out of
Claude or you have a bot that auto
replies on Twitter for you and things
like that, then yeah, this will catch
those things. But if you put any effort
in or do even the most basic of
grammatical pass or changes to the text
that comes out, this will be trivial to
break. It is worth noting that other
labs will likely be doing this soon too.
Thoric called this out. Other labs will
be adding similar watermarking. It's
hard to identify AI generated text and
this gives people better tools to do it.
They'll be shipping a text detection API
as well that we can use ourselves. All
claw generated text will have this
embedded watermarking. For example, you
can check if a PR was generated by cloud
code. That said, it does have
limitations. He just called out the same
section we just read. We also got this
wonderful example of the watermark from
Nat here. Wow, the new claw text
watermarking is wild. Here we can see it
making a list of totally normal, not
suspicious text, but search engine
optimization, but if you look real
closely and you use those thinking
glasses,
Sam Alman sucks. Wow, it's really
subtle, isn't it? Back to the real world
for a sec though because Sean Godc wrote
yet another awesome piece about this
because when the act was officially
announced he had concerns. Article 50 is
the thing we're talking about here. If
LM providers want to do business in the
EU, they'll have to apply watermarks to
their outputs. Some hidden signatures
that can be used to identify AI content.
LM text watermarking is a fascinating
problem. Like the best engineering
problems, it's theoretically hard to
solve perfectly, but has multiple
partial solutions like synth ID and some
quiet unicode trickery from OpenAI and
anthropic. It'll be interesting to see
how these AI labs navigate these
trade-offs before the end of the year.
So, why is this so hard? It's easy to
watermark an image because digital
images contain lots of noise the human
eyes cannot see. For instance, you could
apply a watermark like these 20 pixels
in these exact spots will always share a
color. Text is much much harder. Unlike
images, text is very compressed already.
You cannot make any changes to a
sentence that a human won't notice with
one exception which we'll get to later.
So, how are you supposed to watermark
it? It's basically a textonography
problem concealing a secret code made
more difficult because the plain text
cannot be arbitrarily manipulated. Any
changes you make to apply the watermark
will compromise the quality of the
output. For instance, every fifth letter
is an E would be a good watermark, but
applied naively, it would make the AI
output full of typos. Could you just let
the model figure out how to fit the
watermark? Strong AI models are smart
enough to juggle this kind of
constraint, but it still consume
reasoning time that we better spend on
the user's problem and make the model
sound much less capable than it is. Yep,
sorry. It's steganography. My bad.
Steganography and stenography being so
similar of words is uh humans are not
good at text either. Do we even need
watermarks to detect AI content? If
you're enthropic and you're required to
be able to verify whether your models
produce a particular block of text,
can't you simply run the text through
each model, measuring as you go how
closely the models predicted tokens
match each token from the text? Not
really. The space of all possible cla
answers to a question is way larger than
the space of all possible watermarked
answers to a question. In other words,
you'd get too many false positives for
human text that reads like it was AI
written. I know a couple people,
especially YouTubers, who are hit really
hard with this where like the way they
naturally speak is similar to the LLM
because those models were trained on
them and now whenever they talk was
like, "Oh, that's AI generated, but in
reality, they just talk in the way that
the models liked and copied from them."
It's way more likely for a human to
accidentally write like Claude than it
is for a human to accidentally reproduce
a watermark. It would also be
prohibitively expensive to run every
anthropic model against a piece of text
in order to watermark it. The EU AI act
will eventually require labs like
Enthroic to offer free watermarking
services to every EU citizen. You
couldn't do that with a run this model
based approach. Yep. Apparently, synth
ID is being used for text. Like we need
more reasons for Gemini to be bad. When
an LLM generates text, it's generating a
series of tokens. At each step, the
model itself does not output a single
token, but instead outputs a full list
of 100,000 tokens in its vocabulary,
each annotated with the probability that
that token will be the next one. Tools
like chatbt and claude code will pick
semi-randomly from the most likely
output options in order to get their
outputs. The semi-random sampling
process can be influenced in a
detectable way. For instance, we could
choose a sampling strategy like we pick
the second most likely token, then the
first, then the second, then the first,
and so on to still produce high quality
output, but you'd be able to rerun the
model against the generated text and
verify that the pattern holds. But this
makes verification really expensive, and
any slight tweaks to the output would
break it. also changes to the input
because again the whole context window
is necessary for this. So synth ID does
this instead by assigning a score for
each token based on the previous tokens.
To apply this watermark, the model
adopts a sampling strategy like out of
the top five most likely tokens, pick
the ones with the top synth ID score.
The watermark can then be detected by
calculating the aggregate synth ID score
of a block of text. It's suspiciously
high. It's very likely to be AI
generated. This is similar to noticing a
lot of m dashes, but instead of a list
of keywords, it's subtle math
relationships between things that humans
can't identify as well. And since it's
trivial to sign the scores, it's trivial
to run the watermark detection. The
other strat people have been using are
these different space characters.
There's a lot of different ways to
encode a space in a thing that are not
just the normal space bar press. humans
will not see it. But if you encode these
strategically inside of something that
an AI model writes, you can detect which
ones are where and use this to get real
useful data. I remember Verscell a while
back was working on a feature where you
could edit content on a blog or
something via the Verscell toolbar and
the really clever strategy for linking
different pieces of text in the UI to
the official like CRM backing it for
your blog or whatever was to append
different white code text at the end of
each paragraph so that when you selected
that text in the UI and you made
changes, it'd be able to map it to a
different place in the actual database
simply by detecting which row it does
with an identifier using these different
unicode space characters to hide
messages inside of the UI. It's very
clever and really cool, but also like
easy to trim out, too. If you were to
use different space characters to apply
watermarks, it would be very cheap to
detect, but also easy to filter out too.
Cloud code is apparently doing this in
the past to tag suspicious requests from
Chinese users. In the last few years,
they've noticed that when they copy
blocks of text from chatb and paste in
the VS code, sometimes VS Code marks
some all of the spaces as unusual unic
code characters. Are openthropic using
homoglyphs as AI generated watermarks?
The author's not sure, but they're
definitely using them. Interesting. But
the problem here isn't whether or not
they're easy to add. It's how easy are
they to remove. Because all text
watermarks can be trivially removed. If
you use these Unicode homoglyphs, it's
trivial to just replace them with the
original character. Now you're out of
it. Watermark gone. If you have access
to even a relatively weak unwatermarked
LLM, you can strip out the synth ID
watermarks by asking the LLM to
paraphrase the text content. Because the
watermark is inherent to subtle
vocabulary choices, rewarding the
content will remove that watermark. You
could even do it by hand, although at
that point it's not really AI generated
content anymore. Since there will be
some kind of free public watermark
testing tool, you can just keep tweaking
until it comes back negative. Yep,
that's the other problem. If it's easy
for us to check if text is generated or
not, that works on both sides. Both for
us reading the text and also for people
trying to generate AI text and get it
out there looking like normal text.
Moreover, the AI act requires
watermarking techniques to be
interoperable as far as it is
technically feasible. That means AI
writers will have to publish their
watermarking process and potentially
even attempt to standardize on applying
the same kinds of watermarks. The author
does not see how this is compatible with
the kind of security by obscurity that
LM text watermarking depends on. You
can't be obscure in how you implement it
to hide it, but also give all of these
tools. Like there's a have your cake and
eat it too. By the way, the cake's
invisible and all made up type thing
here. Then we get to C2PA, which is
honestly one of the stronger things in
all of this, but not because of how it
makes it easy to verify AI content.
We'll come back to C2PA in just a
moment. The AI acting code of practice
talks a lot about digitally signed
media. The idea here is that you can
include an AI disclosure in the files
metadata itself. Ideally in a way that
cannot be tampered with like signing a
hash of the files contents. The sign
metadata process is basically the CGPA
content credentials. While you can
remove CGPA metadata, you can't fake it.
So a file with created by human metadata
can be trusted and a file with no
metadata at all can be held in
suspicion. Okay, this is the part that I
actually want to bring up here. The
thing that makes CGPA strong isn't that
it's flagging AI gen content. It's that
it provides standards to identify human
generated content. And that's the only
direction that makes sense here,
especially for media. It's a lot easier
to sign something as really generated by
the chip on your camera with a photo you
took than it is to detect all things
that weren't taken on cameras. And the
more ways we can find to sign human
generated media, the easier this gets.
Because I really do think long-term
that's the only solution that's going to
work. Sadly, the CTPA created by human
markers are not going to solve anything
in text. It only really applies to
files. In the words of the code of
practice, that's quote a data format
that supports attaching metadata like
audio, image, video, or containerized
text. The output of chat tools in most
of the output of AI agents is not
containerized text but plain old regular
text so it cannot be signed. What would
it even look like to sign a chatgbt
output? There's no artifact to pass
around. I think it's fascinating
question whether cloud code has to CGPA
sign any HTML files or PDFs it generates
for you seems kind of tricky to get
right. But in any case, the Act also
mandates some kind of actual
watermarking as well. And the harsh
conclusion here is that no matter what
happens, technical users will be able to
strip out the watermark at will. There
will be a plethora of tools for
nontechnical users that will do the same
thing. We already have a bunch of repos
that are doing watermark removal here.
Unicode text hygiene, statistical
rewrite hooks, and CGPA metadata removal
from PNG, JPEG, SVG, PDF, DOCEX, HTML,
and MD. This is a real repo that already
exists to remove watermarks from AI
generated things. It's an agent skill
and a standard Python script to strip
multi- vendor AI providence marks from
text and files for privacy and hygiene
on content that you own. They have a
skill you can install if you want to
remove AI marks from things that are
generated by the same agent in your
codebase, by the way. So, you can
literally ask Claude to remove the
watermark from Claude's outputs, which
is hilarious. Yeah. To conclude on my
end, the issue here is that this is a
really shitty cat and mouse game where
the mouse has all of the advantages.
It's way too easy to work around these
things and it's way way too hard to do
this type of watermarking in a way that
isn't trivial to bypass. Like I I just
cannot fathom any method where you can
watermark text that isn't either
incredibly expensive to detect or
incredibly cheap to work around. And
that catch 22 is pretty brutal and I
just don't ever see it working out. All
this will ever do is catch the lowest
effort spammers. People setting up bots
that just use Claude or other models to
spam people on Twitter and whatnot. And
they can all move to cheap openweight
models or add really basic checks in
front. But this is not going to stop
anything. This is one of those things
where it like sounds really good and to
normal people, to voters, to
politicians, to all the people involved
in making these processes, it sounds
like a really good idea. We should be
able to detect what text was generated
by models. We should be able to detect
when an image was edited by an LLM. Like
obviously we want these things, but we
literally cannot do it. We have to think
back on what our goal is here. Is our
goal to make it slightly easier to
notice when a random person copy pastes
an output from chat GPT? Is our goal to
make it harder for students in high
school to cheat on essays and have chat
GBT generate them? Or is our goal to get
in front of people using AI to do
destructive campaigns across society,
like a government using it to spread
propaganda and generate a bunch of
messaging that aligns with them? I think
this will help a little bit with the
stopping high school cheaters, but I
don't think it's going to help with
almost anything else here because any
medium or even like slightly higher than
zeroeffort attempt to mislead people
with AI generated stuff will not be
stopped at all by this. And even the
high schoolers are going to find
workarounds if we're being real here.
So, I just I don't see this being
useful. I see this being one of those
things that sounds really good,
especially to normal people that are
getting tired of AI slop destroying
everything around them, but I just don't
perceive this as a thing that will work
for any real use cases. And I think that
we'll get over this watermarking phase
relatively quickly. What we're going to
have to do is start verifying when
images are real instead of fake and
educating the public about the fact that
there are many things that look real and
aren't. Unlike the image I have on my
screen now, which is clearly a real
image of my face on a leg. But generally
speaking, the education side and
flagging of human content is what we
need long term. That's all I have to say
on this one. I honestly wish that the
effort of these really smart people was
put into things that would actually
work. I know this is a good faith effort
to try and make it easier for the public
to adjust to a world with more and more
AI generated stuff, but these efforts
just aren't going to work. Even a very
basic cursory understanding of
engineering and watermarking techniques
makes that obviously the case. How do
you guys feel though? Is this a net
positive or is it just a waste of time?
Curious how you all feel about it. And
until next time, peace nerds.
Ask follow-up questions or revisit key timestamps.
The video discusses the EU's AI Act and its requirements for AI labs to implement watermarking and provenance metadata in AI-generated content. The speaker explores the technical challenges and limitations of these requirements, arguing that watermarking text and media is fundamentally flawed because it is trivial for users to strip or circumvent these markers using simple edits, compression, or paraphrasing. The speaker concludes that while the intent is to increase transparency and combat 'AI slop,' these technical solutions will likely only deter low-effort users and will not effectively stop bad actors or sophisticated misuse, suggesting that focusing on verifying human-generated content is a more viable long-term strategy.
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