Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove

I feel like this is going to end up being like cookie laws. It sounds good, I don't know how any one benefits from it. Currently I can recognize AI text because I read thousands of ai generated text. I know that 110% of yahoo finance news is generated. I don't want to read an AI generated personal blog, but if I do what's the problem really? Other than the companies distinguishing AI text for getting better training data, how do people benefit from watermarked text exactly?

https://declaude.org/watermarking/ did a good job in explaining how SynthID works. As per their blog, it feels like it will be difficult to remove watermarking on bigger text and the checking for watermarking is also not complex

The article mentions you can always simply use a smaller, local, un-watermarked LLM to rephrase the original watermarked text. Which is true, sure. But if we're talking about deterministically taking some watermarked LLM output and having a function removeWatermark(text), it won't necessarily be "trivial" to remove, because the watermark function itself need not be public. Only the API that tests for the watermark need be public, right? Anthropic's magic watermark could be, like the article mentions, something like "every 7th semicolon has a N% chance to be a comma where N is the sum of the last X characters mod Y, and every character in the bit range q1...q2 has a Z% chance to..." etc etc etc. And if Anthropic controls those variables, it would be very difficult to determine the rule, even with some pretty advanced analysis (I would assume). And keep in mind, that example rule I mentioned is pretty naive, too. I expect the actual rule would be way more advanced and not so straightforward as "swap every <charX> for a <charY>"

Yeah, but it's better than nothing. People underestimate the value of rules that only take malice and a little knowledge to break. And they tend to exaggerate that underestimation if they... don't like the rule.

The goal of the AI act is not to determine if an "oh yeah!" comment was AI generated. The target is long papers that falsely claim human review and can have real significant consequences. E.g. research paper, law makers, lawyers, state policies, notaries,... These are much longer content and thus statistically they will disclose a better guess at AI generated content. Asking another AI to paraphrase will not erase the mark (which they are unaware about) but rather cumulatively add their own mark and make it easier to detect. The problem is not to use AI, but to endorse the responsibility of the content you (as a human) deliver and somehow make sure that fake-news, biased content or unverified output is detected as early as possible.