After the EU AI Act’s transparency guidelines went into effect, and following the announcement that most major AI labs will soon be watermarking their text output to comply, there has been some debate about how much of an impact this is going to have, if any, on the quality of the text produced by AI models.
Since the focus of AI labs shifted to code production, I think the written output of the models has gotten much worse.1 But it’s still interesting to try to understand if watermarking could make it even worse.
I found the discussion around technology writer John Gruber’s recent post, Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing, very interesting.
It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance.
