What does it mean to put a ‘watermark’ on AI text? | CNN

For people who still care whether a bit of writing came from a machine or from a human brain, it’s harder and harder to tell the difference. Many people are quite bad at writing. AI models, meanwhile, have advanced to the point of producing text that is, if not what a professional wordsmith would consider good, at least perfectly serviceable. The artificial intelligence company Anthropic seemed to offer a solution last week when it announced that all text generated via its Claude system would soon carry a “watermark.” The change, Anthropic said, is meant to comply with regulations that recently went into effect in the European Union, which mandate that companies mark AI-generated content and make it detectable to users. Other AI companies are likely to follow suit. While AI watermarks have been used to label computer-generated images for years now, text tagging capabilities are newer — Google introduced text watermark technology and made it generally available in October 2024; OpenAI reportedly developed its own tool even earlier, but has so far held off on releasing it. EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN’s “Word of the Week” brings you the meaning behind the words in the news. Or