As someone who writes for a living, I'm wholeheartedly in favour of allowing AI-generated text to be detectable and marked as such. There's just a ridiculous amount of AI slop out there, and an "AI content" label means I don't need to waste my time reading any of it.

However, Anthropic has just announced that it's complying with an EU initiative to have Claude watermark AI-generated text, but doing so in a particularly perverse manner. The most eye-opening requirement in the EU initiative is that AI companies must digitally watermark text output as well as images. This can be done using invisible characters, such as the one I just used to replace the space between the words 'invisible' and 'characters.'

The problem is that some people write their own text and then use AI chatbots for proofreading. It would appear that Claude will embed these hidden watermarks in the language even when it was only asked to identify and correct any grammatical errors in human-written work. This is, of course, one of the features offered by Siri AI. You can highlight text that you've written, tap the Siri button and select the Proofread option.

While Apple will certainly need to respond in time to this issue, I very much hope it will choose a smarter path than that employed by Anthropic.