Authenticity

Anthropic recently announced that Claude models are going to start watermarking the text they generate, with older models getting the feature added over the coming months. The stated reason is compliance with the EU AI Act, which requires AI-generated content to carry some kind of disclosure marker, and it’s a poorly written law, in my opinion, vague enough that I’m not entirely sure how it’s supposed to apply to something like my own workflow.

When I first got onto the World Wide Web, one of the things I liked best about it was that it was, in so many ways, completely bonkers. People were putting up weird stuff, wonderful commentary, exciting new ideas, and just being themselves in a way that was suddenly accessible to everyone around the world, including me, sitting at a computer in my tiny apartment.