AI & Writing
Stop Auditing the Phrases
AI watermarks are shipping this month, and everyone is busy auditing the writing for an answer that was never there. You don't detect who wrote it like a fingerprint. It's an assertion made by the person willing to say, "I wrote this."
This month, a wave of AI watermarks is rolling out, all aimed at solving the question of authorship. But if you look closely, it’s the clearest example I know of trying to solve the wrong problem: running forensics on a crime scene that no longer exists.
Read the fine print on these new watermarks. They only reveal that a model touched the text. They can’t say whether a machine wrote it all, or if I just used an AI to tighten up a single paragraph. The division is invisible. Who authored this is exactly the question the watermark can’t answer. And honestly, a huge amount of writing is edited and altered by copy editors and others whose names never appear on the byline. So the labs keep sharpening their microscopes, auditing phrases more and more, chasing signals that were never there to begin with. Worse, these so-called signatures can be wiped out by running your own non-AI text through an open-weights model, erasing the traces in places like Anthropic and OpenAI.
That’s the anti-pattern: don’t measure the prose. When my writing and a model’s writing look the same on the page, asking, “Did AI help?” is meaningless because the honest answer is nearly always yes, at least a little, and that will only become more common. As these models advance, it gets harder to separate AI from human. The more we use AI, the more our own writing will start to echo it. As the old saying goes: you are what you eat. Your writing becomes like the material you read. You can’t recover authorship from the words themselves.
So measure what you actually can. Every invisible signal gets read through a proxy, a stand-in you can actually measure. For authorship, that proxy is the person. The one who picked the argument, stands behind it, and puts their name on the byline. You can’t fingerprint the writing, so you point to the writer.
“I wrote this” is turning into a claim, not a measurement. It means I chose the argument, I own the mistakes, and if it’s wrong, my name is the one on the line. That’s something you stand behind, not something a classifier scores from your word choices. The signature was always the real proxy. We just never needed it before, because writer and writing used to be welded together.
They aren’t welded anymore. So stop building a sharper microscope for an empty room. Stop auditing every sentence. Instead, ask who’s willing to sign their name to them.