I think this is honestly one of those 100% vs >80% issues. I get that it’s very possible — maybe even easy — to subvert this, but we have had several SITTING POLITICIANS read a fucking AI prompt in the middle of their “big speech” and nobody bats an eye. If they add a measure to outputs that works automatically for 100% of outputs without the people reading it knowing, there’s no chance that it won’t allow you to determine whether or not many outputs are AI.

Correction: consumer grade machine-extruded text will be watermarked.

Machine-extruded text generation controlled by government entities, fascist regime propaganda outlets, capitalist interests and basically anyone else with a ton of money will be welcome to bulldoze venues of public debate with as much un-watermarked thought-slop as they care to generate that will be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

Imagine layers of public influence campaigns, all conjured by LLMs, with agents A/B testing rhetoric constantly for success and efficacy.

Those hidden markers will be very hard to hide in code review in an IDE which highlights invisible Unicode code points. For code, adding watermarks is likely to cause bugs. For text, Chinese models are as good - so just switching to them solves the issue.
I think, Anthropic doesn’t want to perform economic seppuku.

This should be legally mandatory by use in countries.