An invisible AI watermark is coming to your messages. Your relationships may pay the price

The European Union's new transparency rules require companies to watermark content produced by generative AI systems, in a machine-readable format. (Unsplash) Imagine a manager sends a thoughtful message to one of her hard-working employees after a particularly exhausting week in the office.

The message communicates personal warmth, but when the recipient discovers it was generated by AI, it somehow feels less genuine.

In the past, the recipient would only have discovered AI use if the sender disclosed it or through a lucky guess.

Now, the European Union’s new transparency rules require companies to watermark content produced by generative AI systems in a machine-readable format.

Systems already on the market have until December 2026 to comply.

OpenAI reportedly developed such a watermarking system for ChatGPT years ago but held it back for fear of alienating users.

Google now uses a watermarking system called SynthID in its propriety AI models.

Recently Anthropic followed suit , announcing that content generated through its Claude models globally will contain an invisible watermark.

In other words, whether you reside in the EU or Canada or elsewhere, your AI use will no longer remain private or undetectable.

As researchers studying the impact of AI on learning, including the relational and emotional dimensions of that, this development concerns us deeply.

A culture of surveillance Recent research demonstrates that although many people can’t tell whether a personal message was written by AI or not, their perception of the sender changes the moment they learn it was AI-generated.

We tend to read the time and effort someone puts into their writing as signals that we matter to them.

When that work is outsourced to a machine, it feels like some of that care is no longer there, even when the underlying emotions are genuine.

But the process of watermarking AI also feeds into an already prevalent culture of surveillance.