![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/watermark-scaled-1.png\")
So the hot news is EU legislation about watermarking LLM output. I read about this and I’m trying to figure out the problem they’re trying to solve, because it’s not about proving an LLM wrote something to protect you. Let’s just set that PR story aside for a moment. Let’s look at who sponsored this and what the profit angle is and you get a pretty solid story out the gate.The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), whose members include Microsoft, Google, Adobe, OpenAI, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Leica, and the BBC signed onto the specification and approved making it law.
And what is their motivation for doing this? LLM generated content poisoning their datasets.
Is it defeatable? Yes, 100%, and the people most egregiously abusing LLMs to produce the majority of AI slop will already be setting up their workflows to account for this if they haven’t already. So good job guys! Go team.
Who suffers from this? Pretty much everyone else.
1) Just like the hidden dots on every color image you generate from a printer or copy machine since the 2000’s, people who use these tools to mask their identity for privacy reasons will now be sending out their text with a fat bullseye embedded in it, potentially directing the document directly back to its author.
2) You think AI output has been sanded to hell and back already? Now add on a sanding algorithm that cuts semantic grooves in your text to force a provenance marker and the more that bullseye gets tightened the fatter the grooves get like a fingerprint where “let me push back on that” becomes yet another signature like above that Joe Schmoe in Nebraska wrote that line.
3) The person who writes 95% of a document and uses an model to polish that last 5% is now branded with the scarlet letter of “AI SLOP!” as the worst of the worst, and apparently in this law if that person then makes a future revision that tampers with that watermark they may in the future become criminally liable.
4) The secretary for a large company who uses AI to create a master document template\/letterhead and since this poison doesn’t even need to be semantic (it can literally be a judicious use of Zero-width Unicode characters in the model output), every single person who uses that document, even if they wrote 100% of the content placed on it will carry the branding.
I could go on about all the ways this has nothing to do with the stated goals and is a lose-lose for the casual user. This is a way for these companies to protect their precious data they are stealing from everyone so they can filter out the “fakes” and keep stealing the human produced output.
It also pushes all the models away from what makes them unique and drives their output into convergence around a formal watermark structure that corrupts the information in the source material.
AI generated content can be a problem. This is not fixing that problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"