Tell HN: Finally, a good use for the 9th bit

One of the machines I worked with in the 1980's was a curious design called the Univac 1100. It ran a typical mainframe OS and was used to the various calculations and record keeping that a large bank requires. It has 36 bit 'words' and 9 bit 'bytes'. The machine supported various character sets and one of those was ASCII. But ASCII is an 8 bit convention, and even there only 7 bits are really used. But that 9th bit... it was always zero. Now, in 2023 I finally have a good use for the 9th bit: to mark which characters are AI produced and which ones are human. Then you could colorize a text based on the value of that bit and instantly know which part of a piece of writing originated with a person and which was spit out by an LLM.

Of course this isn't going to happen, but it would be really nice if we found a way to get to the equivalent of that, some way to 'taint' the output of AI, to create the equivalent of a radioactive marker so that readers of text have a fighting chance of weighing it properly.