Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Unicode can maybe invent an escape code.

That is one law I could get behind actually: the absolute requirement to label any and all AI output by using a duplicate of all of Unicode that looks the same and feels the same but is actually binary in a different space.

And then browsers and text editors could render this according to the user's settings.

Yes, it would already help if they started with whitespace and punctuation. That would already give a big clue as to what is AI generated.

In fact, using a different scheme, we can start now:

    U+200B — ZERO WIDTH SPACE

Require that any space in AI output is followed by this zero-width character. If this is not acceptable then maybe apply a similar rule to the period character (so the number of "odd" characters is reduced to one per sentence).

Unfortunately, people here know their way around tools to take out the markers. Probably someone will vibe up a browser plugin for it.

I sometimes use AI to fix my English (especially when I'm trying to say something that pushes my grammar skill to the limit) and people like me can use that to inform others about that. Bad actors will always do weird stuff, this is more about people like me who want to be honest, but signing with (generated/edited with AI) is too much noise.

Yes, and I think the big AI companies will want to have AI-generated data tagged, because otherwise it would spoil their training data in the long run.

I would not be at all surprised if they already watermark their output but just didn't bother to tell us about it.

A little bit of advice: don't copy and paste the LLM's output, but actively read and memorize it (phrase by phrase), and then edit your text. It helps developing your competence. Not a lot, and it takes time, but consciously improving your own text can help.

Thank you for the advice, I'll try next time!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com