Micah Musser, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, expresses skepticism about whether this watermarking style will actually work as intended. Wouldn’t a bad actor try to get their hands on a non-watermarked version of the generator? Musser contributed to a paper studying mitigation tactics to counteract AI-fueled propaganda. OpenAI and the Stanford Internet Observatory were also part of the research, laying out key examples of potential misuse as well as detection opportunities.

One of the paper’s core ideas for synthetic-text spotting builds off Meta’s 2020 look into the detection of AI-generated images. Instead of relying on changes made by those in charge of the model, developers and publishers could flick a few drops of poison into their online data and wait for it to be scraped up as part of the big ole data set that AI models are trained on. Then, a computer could attempt to find trace elements of the poisoned, planted content in a model’s output.

The paper acknowledges that the best way to avoid misuse would be to not create these large language models in the first place. And in lieu of going down that path, it posits AI-text detection as a unique predicament: “It seems likely that, even with the use of radioactive training data, detecting synthetic text will remain far more difficult than detecting synthetic image or video content.” Radioactive data is a difficult concept to transpose from images to word combinations. A picture brims with pixels; a Tweet can be 5 words.

What unique qualities are left to human-composed writing? Noah Smith, a professor at the University of Washington and NPL researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, points out that while the models may appear to be fluent in English, they still lack intentionality. “It really messes with our heads, I think,” Smith says. “Because we've never conceived of what it would mean to have fluency without the rest. Now we know.” In the future, you may need to rely on new tools to determine whether a piece of media is synthetic, but the advice for not writing like a robot will remain the same.

Avoid the rote, and keep it random.