Does ‘AI-watermarking’ mean the party is over for cheating students?

Concerns about students cheating with AI are rife within schools and universities.

Some lecturers have even expressed fears students have been “lobotomised by AI” amid reports AI-detection tools are patchy and far from fool-proof.

Last week, New South Wales moved to ban take-home assignments for Year 12 to try to stop AI use in assessments.

At the same time, a major generative AI system has developed a way to “watermark” whether or not a text is AI.

Developer Anthropic, has announced the text output of Claude (one of the five big AI tools) will include a hidden label or watermark indicating the text is AI-generated.

Files generated by Claude, including Word and PowerPoint, will also contain an additional watermark hidden in the file itself.

What does this mean for efforts to stamp out cheating? Read more: Oral exams are making a comeback to stop AI cheating.

But they have their own problems Why a watermark? Anthropic took this step after signing up to the European Union’s new AI act .

The act requires providers of AI systems that create synthetic audio, video, images or text to identify the outputs as AI-generated.

Other tech companies, such as OpenAI (which runs ChatGPT), have developed a text watermarking tool, but not rolled it out publicly.

The watermarking is not an image superimposed over the text.

It is invisibly embedded through the text .

Readers will need a “detection mechanism” (yet to be released by Anthropic) to pick up the watermark.

If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.