ChatGPT will soon start secretly watermarking its answers — here's what that means for the text you copy and share

I wrote earlier this year about Claude’s decision to comply with the EU AI Act , which requires all AI-generated text to be identifiable as AI, and start to insert a watermark into its text.

Rather than limit this to EU customers, however, Anthropic decided to roll the feature out globally, which seemed a bit of an overreaction at the time.

OpenAI has now announced that it is following suit, but limiting the geographical areas of impact to the EU only.

It is going to start inserting watermarks into generated text, but only for ChatGPT customers who live in the EU.

That means that US and UK users won’t be affected at all.

OpenAI announced the change on October 5 saying: “Over the coming weeks, we will add an invisible watermark to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union.” Inserting the watermark To insert the watermark, which involves subtly changing the word choice for generated text, OpenAI is using a system of its own called textGrain.

A note on the OpenAI website says: “Our text watermarking technology, textGrain, adds an invisible statistical signal to the model’s word choices.

Our detector looks for that signal to assess whether a passage contains an OpenAI watermark.

More details about how textGrain works can be found in our technical report ⁠ , which will be updated with additional details in the coming weeks.” Like many people, I find that idea that the word choice of the AI that I’m paying to use is now being influenced by a watermarking algorithm, not by what’s optimal for me the customer, to be deplorable.

I’m not saying that the resulting text will automatically be worse because of the watermark, but it certainly won’t be optimal.

It also sounds like it’s an easily broken solution that is full of holes.

To detect AI text that’s produced using textGrain's watermarking a special AI detection tool needs to be used, which it’s currently unavailable to the public.

OpenAI says it is providing detector access to researchers and expert organizations and that approved researchers and expert organizations can apply starting today.

“The tool will report whether it detects an OpenAI watermark”, continues the OpenAI article “without identifying the user or revealing their prompts or conversations.