Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove

Re:Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove by pavon on Thursday August 13, 2026 @01:14PM (#49289014)

If a language supports unicode it will have a fairly permissive definition of whitespace, and it will be easy to generate permutations of the whitespace that meet the syntax requirements.

Of course I would want my code formatting tool to normalize that all to plain 0x20 spaces. But it would still be a helpful "brown M&M" test of did you even read CONTRIBUTING and run the code formatter before submitting this PR?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove by JoshTriplett on Thursday August 13, 2026 @01:53PM (#49289590)

Code submitted to a project should follow the formatting standards of that project and its programming language, which doesn't leave much room for flexibility in whitespace. However, there are many ways to write comments, and many ways to write PR descriptions and commit messages, and often many choices of words to name identifiers, and other potential sources of bits of entropy with no functional impact. It doesn't take that many bits to encode a robust "AI was here" indicator.

[ Parent | on HN ]