The problem with pretending is that people who k ow what they’re doing get away with it while people who don’t (and don’t even use ai) get unfairly accused of using it.

There just isn’t enough information in plain text to do this and we should stop pretending there is.

If we need to verify something isn’t made with ai then we need other ways of doing so - eg looking at a document edit history, doing it as an exam, oral defense.

There are options! But pretending you can tell if text is ai will only catch out people who make no effort to hide it and will inevitably have false positives.

It seems like it would be so low effort to bypass, especially when you can just train a system (maybe even another LLM) using the watermarker validation from Anthropic themselves.

It seems it would get as simple as:

  outputText = promptLLM(prompt)
  scrubbedText = scrubWatermark(outputText)

Might help with students and low-technical people passing off work as their own, but any industrial scale slop-generator should be able to bypass it trivially.

> If it bears the mark, it is likely generated (or someone deliberately made it look generated).

One could even say, the mark is load-bearing.