OpenAI Is Adding Text Watermarking In ChatGPT and Codex 85
OpenAI is rolling out an invisible, machine-readable text watermark called textGrain to ChatGPT and Codex, "but only for users in the European Union at first," reports The Verge. From the report: OpenAI says its textGrain watermarking "matched or exceeded" other approaches like Google DeepMind's SynthID for text, which is also the basis for the watermarking Anthropic announced in August. Like OpenAI, Anthropic made the move to meet the requirements of the EU's AI Act; however, not everyone was happy to learn about the addition. OpenAI also included scores from AI benchmarks showing similar performance from watermarked and unwatermarked text. But it notes that textGrain "does not guarantee reliable detection," and says text watermarks don't verify accuracy, determine who owns the text, measure how much a human contributed, or prove human authorship.
Paywalled AI Marketing (Score:2, Interesting)
Can we stop promoting this crap.
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Just get the archive page extension then you can bypass paywalls.
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Watermarks are "marketing"?
What user wants watermarks?
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I'll repeat: watermarks are anti-marketing. They discourage use.
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I'll repeat: watermarks are anti-marketing. They discourage use.
Every chance to get another story about how AI is so powerful it must be regulated serves at least two purposes. First, it is an advertisement for the power of the technology. Second, it is a plea to allow the entrenched AI companies to write regulation to permit them to control the industry. These are not extremely complicated ideas, though they do require that you not cede responsibility for thinking to software which is incapable of doing it because the tokens don't mean anything to it. It has the same a
Re:Paywalled AI Marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody, I repeat, nobody who uses AI is going to see "OpenAI adding watermarks" and think, "Oh, I better use AI more, especially OpenAI".
And nobody, I repeat, nobody who doesn't use AI is going to see "OpenAI adding watermarks" and think, "Oh, I better use AI more, now that it'll be easier to see that what I did is made by AI."
It is not "an advertisement of the power of the technology". It's a regulation forced on them by the EU's AI Act, which neither companies nor users want.
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Nobody, I repeat, nobody who uses AI is going to see "OpenAI adding watermarks" and think, "Oh, I better use AI more, especially OpenAI".
You're very good at ignoring things, like the rest of the story.
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It's a regulation forced on them by the EU's AI Act, which neither companies nor users want.
The target audience for this particular rule of the AI Act isn't the producers or users of AI. It is the consumers of content that might be AI generated.
And frankly, letting people know if they see AI content or not is a fair thing to ask.
you are here (Score:3)
understandable frustration, but you forget that this site lives off advertising, particularly for other outlets looking for visibility. it's natural that they service the stampede du jour, the endless stream of chatter and circular nonsense about ai (or crypto or whatever). also, in this particular case the subject has at least some mild technical interest.
what other generalist technically oriented forums are free from this eternal plague? even soylentnews is swamped with it ...
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Yes, I know brother.
But what should we do? Lie down?
Coming on here, enriches my life, perhaps more than that of those that seek power, dominance and control as a route to their peace. I am responsible for my peace, I don't need to change or be dependent on the world for it.
It is so much easier to really manage one's self, we might even call it natural. And I am inclined to share what I have, there is lots of suffering and confusion out there.
Sheepdog.
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It's not "speculative layoffs", it's real people and real lives transformed.
A consultancy I worked at has gone through laying off hundreds of developers and business analysts, including many senior developers. Due to AI, you only need a handful of developers now, just to review/test code and at the odd times, make up the shortfall in AI.
Some devs claim AI is rubbish, but in my experience those are the people who used GPT-4 or earlier models and made up their mind, or those that try to feed it endless lines
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You are right, forgive me if I sound glib. Redundancy is no joke and the impact is devastating.
I cant vouch for the reliability of this link ai lay offs [layoffs.fyi], when the big employers are laying off 1000's that's speculative, and it can only be speculative given the speed it happened and the complexity and size of their operations. It is most likely natural downsizing for post pandemic drop in demand, dressed up as AI investment bandwagon, reducing cost to make profits look better and please investors. Short te
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Watermarks are not about copyright, but about fraud prevention.
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Thank you, I may have mis-understood.
How do you feel about companies that have to be legislated to manage fraud protection? Do you trust them?
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I dislike the idea about AI results being forced to have watermarks.
One suspicion is, that an invisible and in the new systems even encrypted watermark (you can only detect it when you know the key, otherwise it is indistinguishable from random noise) may now or in future contain a user id. Suppose you generate some political cartoon and the next government really dislikes it. Who knows if they won't ask the AI company to look up who generated it.
The next is, that the current climate about AI already lead t
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Perhaps "Made by AI" is all that's needed, rather than made by the company. And its an international open register, anonymous.
But it feels a bit late, and pointless, better to work on a tool perhaps another AI that recognises AI produced work or scams fast. Deep Fakes and counterfeit are the most worrying, because as much as I love humans, a lot of them are evidently gullible/naive/dumb given the crap they believe on Social Media where he who shouts loudest gets heard.
Ho hum
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The opposite direction of photo sensors signing may be more interesting. The problem is, e.g. news outlets want to edit. They at least want to put their logo on there. That leads to people wanting a signature chain, with Photoshop signing "They just put a logo there, this bounding box is the only edited part" and has signing keys and trusted computing components that are incompatible with open source (in the sense of being able to modify it instead of only using a signed (possibly reproducible) official bui
So what? (Score:2)
It is a problem for chatgpt users, and that's far from their worst problem. Using chatgpt is more of a problem.
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Oh... wah wah... can't use their ChatGPT.
Maybe your kids can learn how to write their essay by hand.
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They do. In cursive, too.
Writing is a very important skill to have, you can't do advanced stuff well without it.
If you want to be really stupid .. (Score:4, Insightful)
.. make yourself dependent on AI.
Let it think for you. Just do what it says, it is so much easier. Vote Billionaire, vote yourself poor! Vote for freedom from owning anything and renting it all!
You don't need powers of cognition, you don't need an opinion, we'll sell it to you. I don't know how you'll pay for that without a job, who knows? Maybe AI does, I don't really care, I'm RICH!
AI. It's like watching evolution take a leap backwards.
Re:If you want to be really stupid .. (Score:4, Interesting)
It can actually do incredible things. Dump the contents of an eeprom and upload it to Claude.
Ask it to decompile the binary back into c code.
done
Analyze the source and figure out what string the cpu is looking for in order to boot
done
Write me a python script that sends this string thru my serial port
done
Now I have a working piece of test equipment.
Dumb people are going to do dumb things with smart tools.
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Genius... you could just understand the code and write a program.
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That was the point I was trying to make, your example is very good, you needed to be familiar with the task.
That's a million miles from AI will replace all jobs nonsense. A highly irresponsible claim. Not unlike, crypto is the best kind of money.
Re:If you want to be really stupid .. (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a very small group of people that think that's incredible, the rest wont get it.
And even for you to get to that point required you to have a deep understanding of what you wanted to achieve, maybe years of experience to describe it.
Good luck to you, unless you are rolling your own LLM, every time you use these commercial LLMs you are devaluing your work towards redundancy and giving away your talent to people who are rich enough already.
The newbie your boss wont hire now, because they think you can produce more with AI, wont get the chance to learn as you did. When you come to retire succession is going to be harder, harder for you to retire after you've been working harder and longer than planned and missed any satisfaction of passing your skills and experience on to a junior colleague.
Granted that scenario may not be yours, if it were .. .. it would be really stupid to be dependent on Artificial Intelligence. Develop your own, or lose it. Brain is like muscle, it likes training.
Re:If you want to be really stupid .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially since you know the AI tools are going to be enshittified in short order. That ChatGPT query is free today, tomorrow once you're hooked and can't live without it, it's going to be a dollar query. 50 cents if you can wait for it to be answered during "off peak" hours.
Because that's the business model that's likely to win out. Get kids hooked on AI then get to bill everyone $50/month to use it because they've gotten so reliant on it that they can't live without it.
The whole AI causing shortages is to ensure that you don't get a chance to run local models yourself without paying for the privilege.
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Just wait until AI is baked into your cell phone, fridge, toaster, microwave, TV, car... oh, wait... it's already there!
Soon, I can see it switching to paid-only... you can't even toast a slice of bread or call your mom unless you pay the $250 AI bill (if it's not just automatically withdrawn from your bank).
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Yes run your own. Oppose Big tech AI domination and control of knowledge and retain the value of your work, your livelihood and your freedom.
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I'm surprised you didn't use the word "slop". Spewing a bunch of slogans that would have to be more clever to make it on to bumper stickers makes you look like the people you are complaining about. There are legitimate criticisms to make about AI, and ways to support and defend those arguments. You are not doing that.
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Invested in AI much?
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If I were, perhaps it's because I'm not seeing any of the real stuff here.
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I didn't know I'd meet the arbiter of intelligence today.
The only thing you are exhibiting here is arrogance and ignorance. You sound like a 14 year old.
I am hungover and can happily call you names all day long, unless you have something useful to contribute?
You could try it without using AI, see if you are capable.
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That might feel like clever. You've not increased your cleverness, you have increased your productivity by becoming dependent on tools you are training that will eventually decrease the value of your labour.
That's not clever at all. That's self defeating in the long term.
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Yup I beginning to realise that the LLM AI story is also a story of domination of knowledge.
A utopia of ignorance.
Domination was always the devil's work.
Very funny (Score:2, Insightful)
After you paste the AI-generated text into your dissertation in Libreoffice, the 'watermark' is gone.
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First, I'd paste it into notepad just to make sure.
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Re: Very funny (Score:4, Insightful)
The watermark is in the pseudorandom number generator that makes the words, genius. You can copy it in purple crayon and it will still show up if the text is long enough.
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So how is this different from the way it's always worked? It's never been difficult to spot AI slop precisely because of how similar it all is.
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"AI slop" is so 2024. That argument isn't valid any more.
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Actually "AI slop" was late 2025 and early 2026.
There's still some slop, but no where near as bad as a few months ago - that's the terrifying speed of how quickly AI is improving [artificialanalysis.ai].
I'm sure by end of this year, beginning of next, it will be hard to come by.
It's terrifying how realistic photos and videos look, that it's become exponentially easier to create fake content to spread hate and division - it takes seconds to create, and hours or days to debunk and prove it's fake.
I think that's the reason watermarks
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Images are mostly solved and you only recognize those of popular generators that enforce (at least for lazy prompting) their own style. Yeah, you can recognize may ChatGPT images (and I dislike their current style), but only because they use their model in a way that leads to a signature style. The techniques behind that (and I think even correct ChatGPT prompting) can do completely different styles.
Text ... seems a bit harder. I've yet to see a model that is really good at creative writing. And the current
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RTFA
Re:Very funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but that's not how this works.
At the softmax, the hidden state of the last layer output is converted back to token-space / text-space. This is a high-dimensional-space to low-dimensional-space conversion, so there is usually no "single right path" in which the target concept can be represented. The softmax in effect converts the nearest token pathways into probabilities; the closer the token's position to the latent position, the higher the probability.
So you have a probability-scaled list of options. Sometimes, the token that comes after is almost 100% certain. For example:
"This artifact was found in the tomb of the boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun "
Sometimes it's not:
"Ravi was hungry, so he climbed the mango tree and picked (... a mango)"
"Ravi was hungry, so he climbed the mango tree and carefully (...picked a mango)"
"Ravi was hungry, so he climbed the mango tree and grabbed (...a mango)"
Etc. There may be a whole wide range of possibilities.
A primitive watermarking algorithm, thus, can be represented in the "even-odd" algorithm. You divide up all tokens randomly into even or odd bins. On even-numbered generated tokens, you slightly increase the odds of tokens from the "even" bin and decrease them from the "odd" bin - maybe, say, "picked" declines in odds and "grabbed" rises. On odd-numbered generations you reverse your boosting. The probability shifts aren't huge, so it's still going to say "Tutankhamun", not "TutankhJetBrains", regardless of whether it's an even or odd token. But it might flip, say, "picked" vs. "carefully" vs. "grabbed" or whatnot. With a large enough sample size - and it doesn't have to be huge - you can tell whether this token bias exists.
This is, as mentioned, a primitive algorithm, and it has vulnerabilities - but it's not hard to see how you can adapt it to more advanced algorithms that are less vulnerable to user manipulation.
So no, you can't get rid of the watermark just by cut and paste. It's embedded in the choice of wording itself.
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TL/DR , your options are:
1) Rewrite it in your own words
2) Have a model make a summary or shorthand version of the watermarked version, then have a non-watermarking model flush it back out
3) Use a non-watermarking model to begin with.
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Dear Gemini,
Please paraphrase this GPT-inspired homework so that I sound like Copilot submitting my assignment at 11:59pm after consuming seven cups of coffee to keep myself awake.
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It'll still get tagged by SynthID.
You have to use a non-watermarking LLM. Saying "Don't do anything that will watermark it" doesn't help.
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SynthID in text genuinely is invisible. The probability shifts are small, and all the pathways are valid pathways to express the same thought.
And no, you cannot "collide" text watermarks. At best, it'll only have the latter one's watermark. At worst, both.
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You confuse "invisible to humans" with "invisible to statistical analysis". Humans can't, for example, see the difference between metameric colours. Statistical analysis can. Humans can't see minor drift at scales where Brownian motion dominates. Statistical analysis can. Humans can't see the difference between background disease rates and new rising threats. Statistical analysis can. On and on. Statistical analysis is a far mo
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OR, now hear me out:
4) do it yourself without AI.
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Here's a video [youtube.com] about how it works. Really quite interesting.
So what's it good for? (Score:2)
"OpenAI also included scores from AI benchmarks showing similar performance from watermarked and unwatermarked text. But it notes that textGrain "does not guarantee reliable detection," and says text watermarks don't verify accuracy, determine who owns the text, measure how much a human contributed, or prove human authorship. "
Oh, I see, it is good for Company Misdirection: "OOooooo.....look at that Blibbering Humdinger in the window" (to reuse a Luna Lovegood phrase).
Re:So what's it good for? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not hard to see how this can backfire. People treat watermarks as the Word of God. But let's say, for example, a journalist, in an article, quotes a White House press statement for something, but the White House used AI. Since they don't "measure how much a human contributed", and detect the watermark in the White House statement in the journalist's article, they'll just flag the whole journalist's article as AI.
And honestly, "not measuring how much a human contributed" is IMHO a massive flaw in general even if the author was using AI. If the person wrote an article, and then told an AI, "correct my spelling, grammar, and poor phrasing", that's IMHO entirely different from the person just telling an AI "Write this article for me", and just pasting whatever it spits out in as their own, whole cloth. Contribution assessment is, IMHO, essential for fairness. And also, eminently doable. It is perfectly technologically possible to not just see, "does this signature exist", but even get a sense of exactly what the AI contributed vs. what it didn't.
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Clever bot, you removed your em-dash from your reply!
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Exactly, my top use of AI is probably, this prompt:
Please review the document below for typographical and grammatical errors and make the required edits. Do not suggest edits that simply alter style or tone. You may make clarity changes, such as splitting a compound sentence into two separate thoughts or exchanging a pronoun for the proper noun it references. Replacing a less specific nouns such as 'thing' and 'it', with a more concrete noun being referenced; as long as it will not read as overly verbose
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Which is what I've been saying as well [slashdot.org]. If all you're doing is asking for suggestions to something you have already written, using AI is no different than using a human editor. It's your work. It's been written. You're just looking for advice on how to improve it.
This is completely different than people who tell AI what they want and it does all the w
AI done foolishly (Score:2)
They are so bent on faking intelligence we are not allowed specialized tools - or when we had them those are being replaced with these fake general intelligence chat bot.
Grammar checkers are old; they did get better and I read some so good they were re-writing too much and actually limited due to expert feedback which users may have liked. Today to get a good grammar checker is hard because even the ones you pay for are trying to replace them with general AI bots.
It wouldn't hallucinate, etc. if it wasn't
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I don't disagree with any of that. I see a lot of LLM and agents being thrown at problems we used to have much more tailored tools for that did at least as good a job, while consuming a tiny and by some comparisons almost immeasurably small amount of compute resources.
You're not wrong, Word 6 on a 486 with less than handful of megabytes of memory was able to perform grammar checking on word doc. Now you need 10s of gigs of primary storage, perhaps as much as 50 gigs of secondary storage between the model an
Translation (Score:2)
I've had students legitimately using translation tools to get better english. With AI, they do much better but also it looks like AI and I can't possibly tell if they had AI do the work or if they merely translated or corrected their poor mixed english answers. So then everything has to be evaluated without the tools they come to depend upon. Tools that are legitimate if limited to translation. The subject isn't english and is not a requirement for competency in that subject; they could go back home with
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And honestly, "not measuring how much a human contributed" is IMHO a massive flaw in general
Fun fact: The EU AI Act considers this. It makes a difference between "AI generated" and "AI modified".
But it's hard to put this into the type of watermarking they are using. Because if you generate a text and then change a few things here and there what you are doing is degrading the watermark. But since the watermark is probabilistic, it's hard to tell if it was a weak watermark from the start or if it was degraded.
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Perhaps you should be realizing by now that homework is no longer a viable way to test how well students actually know the subject matter, and the only viable way to do so is in-class tests/exercises - frequent enough and worth enough of the grade to force them to study between lessons.
OR, alternatively, you could just keep doing what you're doing, and instead, in effect grade people on:
Comparably poor grades:
* People who actually do the work by hand
* "AI N00bs" who let stuff like that slip through
Comparabl
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It takes one hell of a toll to try to do verbal exams 1:1 on students to evaluate them. In person exams in a monitored room are not so easy either... not that we have a huge problem now with undetectable ear plugs or smart glasses or anal beads or remote controls... but that tech progresses and demand will increase with more in person testing. A radio shielded test room would work well until local run AI fits in your underwear. Then you have an increasing number of IEPs so you can't even do a quiz without e
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Nobody said "verbal exams 1:1".
The only thing that is required is that they be separated from their computers and their phones.
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As Eric Raymond (ESR) says, AI is a force multiplier. My elaboration: If you are good at what you do, it will let you do accomplish more good stuff faster. If you are not very bright, AI will let you be not bright more efficiently, but it won't make you bright. It's just a tool. It needs to be utilized correctly. There is no shortage of things in this world that can do tremendous damage if not used properly. AI is nothing new in that regard.
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E.g. use it to lineedit your assignment and highlight errors. Don't get it to WRITE the assignment in the first place.
Otherwise you're throwing the contents of a garbage can into the oven and pressing a button that says 'pizza' - when you've never seen a pizza before, or tasted one.
Computerphile video on AI watermarking text (Score:3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
All AI/bot traffic should be watermarked. (Score:2)
Half the traffic is now from AI and bots, in another year? Yea don't say we didn't see it coming.
Practical consequences on the output (and check) (Score:2)
The PDF: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/e95... [openai.com]
I wonder how the watermarking could be revealed without access to the original model it was generated on. I guess this is a requirement: only OpenAI can assess this, right?