> It is nothing more than an effort, sometimes overdone and misguided, to not say things that make minorities feel bad.
Unless it enforced by governments or other monopolies. Then it inevitably leads to lèse majesté, because 1) powerless minorities are powerless, and 2) the controllers of governments and monopolies (the powerful themselves) are a minority group.
The protection of the feelings of powerless minorities is a Trojan Horse; the grievances of powerless minorities are usually far more serious than hurt feelings, not saying magic words involves far less effort than actually addressing those grievances, and demanding that the public changes the way they speak costs governments and monopolies nothing. It in fact allows them to build the technical and legal structures to enforce lèse majesté.
> If anyone serious thinks political correctness is going to end racism, I certainly haven’t seen it.
Not if you say it like that, because it's so obviously stupid. But if you really investigate with people why they want people to stop saying "the n-word," they'll admit they have a fantasy that the sentiment will disappear with the word: it's why they also want black people themselves to stop saying it. The possibility that the sentiment will stay but that black people will lose the language to refer to it doesn't occur to them.
Just like color-blind casting of historical theatrical works isn't seen as a whitewashing of the racism of the past; there's a fantasy that if you wipe the memory of racism from the media, then it will somehow wipe it from the world rather than just gaslight minorities about their own pasts (and thereby their present condition.) At least that's just in the media, and breaking up monopolies can just make it a form of individual artistic expression rather than a diktat.
The censorship of speech itself, however, is a totalitarian version of this. It can only be done by monopolies. To make sure that people can't eat if they express themselves in a particular way is as compelling as you can get.
None of this has anything to do with AI watermarking, though, which is good. Somebody made a good point above that watermarking would allow a cartel of AI providers to make sure that their models were trained with uncontaminated data, while everybody else would have to train with the stepped-on garbage they were spitting out. But that's a job for antitrust. If you don't have antitrust, you don't have markets and you don't have freedom. Little technical touches around the edges are worthless. If they share, make them share with the entire class.