Our approach to EU text provenance rules

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• Hacker News
• Mandating and accepting broad use of text watermarking at scale seems prime to enable all sorts of dumb and chaotic downstream effects. Not only do you start to pollute further corpus at scale - hijack text space bandwidth and fidelity - but you open the societal door to gradually add additional pieces of information - such as author identities or ad tracking information - which can then not just directly reveal a single author, but potentially larger graphs of information propagation without it being clear to anyone propagating such a trace.
  by pveierland
• My personal opinion is that they cheated evaluations to be able to release this pretending that it has no meaningful impact.

  Otherwise, I don't see any logical explanation that some of their benchmark results would be higher when watermarked. Except if benchmark results are so unstable that they are an useless metric.

  by greatgib
• Worth noting that this is what OpenAI wrote about text watermarking two years ago:

  > While it has been highly accurate and even effective against localized tampering, such as paraphrasing, it is less robust against globalized tampering; like using translation systems, rewording with another generative model, or asking the model to insert a special character in between every word and then deleting that character - making it trivial to circumvention by bad actors.

  > Another important risk we are weighing is that our research suggests the text watermarking method has the potential to disproportionately impact some groups. For example, it could stigmatize use of AI as a useful writing tool for non-native English speakers.

  https://openai.com/index/understanding-the-source-of-what-we...

  by k1m
• Could this technique be theoretically used to track users themselves? It would be quite ironic if the EU forced tech companies to implement extra tracking, wouldn't it?
  by Aerroon
• > Starting today, API customers globally will be able to opt in to text watermarking for select models. Text watermarking will remain off by default in the API.

  > Over the coming weeks, we will add an invisible watermark to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union.

  by m-hodges
• It’s obvious that such boneheaded methods don’t work. So what’s next? First, we need to deal with basic word substitution, which seems theoretically feasible. Then we need to deal with encodings such as Caesar cipher, replacing spaces with zero-width spaces, Base64, etc. Your account will be flagged and reported for outputting obfuscated text. What’s next after that? Ooops, you output too many vim commands instead of outputting text directly, your account is flagged and reported to Europol. You think you can bypass that with Deepseek? No, it will be banned alongside VPN.
  by LudwigNagasena
• This is such a waste of time. If someone wants to bypass this it will be rather simple. Just change the words. If someone wants to avoid fingerprinting they will. Can’t we just focus on building rather than spending brainpower on these ridiculous sidequests
  by mgax
• This approach feels wrong. For code, it's obvious now that Claude is adding watermarks through comments because they are way too long. I keep asking Claude to remove and reduce its comments.

  Also, I don't think it's useful because AI involvement in the work is a spectrum, not a binary true or false. If I ask Claude to go over my code and fix up typos and clean up and it starts adding comments with hidden watermarks everywhere it makes the tiniest adjustment, it's essentially appropriating my code. Its contribution may be trivial and superficial.

  When I use AI on my own projects, the code it generates basically looks like auto-complete to me; exactly what I would have written by hand. So I don't see why it needs to be marked as AI. It's just saving me time. It's very much my own work.

  by socketcluster