This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Concerns about students cheating with AI are rife in schools and universities. Some lecturers have even expressed fears that students have been "lobotomized by AI" amid reports AI-detection tools are patchy and far from foolproof.
Last week, New South Wales moved to ban take-home assignments for Year 12 to try to stop AI use in assessments. At the same time, a major generative AI system has developed a way to "watermark" text to indicate whether it is AI-generated. Developer Anthropic has announced the text output of Claude (one of the five big AI tools) will include a hidden label or watermark indicating the text is AI-generated.
Files generated by Claude, including Word and PowerPoint, will also contain an additional watermark hidden in the file itself. What does this mean for efforts to stamp out cheating? Anthropic took this step after signing on to the European Union's new AI Act.
The act requires providers of AI systems that create synthetic audio, video, images or text to identify the outputs as AI-generated. Other tech companies, such as OpenAI (which runs ChatGPT), have developed a text watermarking tool but have not rolled it out publicly. The watermark is not an image superimposed over the text.
It is invisibly embedded through the text. Readers will need a "detection mechanism" (yet to be released by Anthropic) to pick up the watermark. If this sounds too good to be true, that's because it is.
As with AI detection, watermarking can be evaded using other AI tools. The absence of a marker also doesn't guarantee that AI wasn't used. Even Anthropic warns its watermarking cannot tell "whether the text was human-written." It doesn't work on small samples of writing.
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