the idea sounds simple. embed an invisible watermark in every piece of ai-generated text. detectors can then check for the watermark instead of guessing from statistics. problem solved.

except it's not.

how ai watermarking works

the basic approach: when generating text, slightly bias the model toward choosing certain words in certain positions. the bias creates a pattern that's invisible to readers but detectable by software that knows the pattern.

think of it like a steganographic signal hiding in the word choices. you'd never notice it reading normally. but a tool that knows the watermark scheme can detect it reliably.

openai, google, and others have researched this. some have implemented versions. the detection accuracy is theoretically very high.

why it falls apart in practice

paraphrasing removes it. the watermark lives in specific word choices. change the words and the watermark disappears. even basic paraphrasing disrupts it. paraai's deep rewriting with fine-tuned models completely eliminates any watermark because the text is regenerated from scratch — new words, new structure, new patterns.

open-source models don't watermark. llama, mistral, and other open models have no watermarking requirement. anyone can run them locally with zero watermarks. a detector that only catches watermarked text misses all open-source output.

translation breaks it. translate watermarked english text to spanish and back. the watermark is gone. the meaning survives.

editing breaks it. enough human editing disrupts the pattern. change 20-30% of the words and the watermark becomes unreliable.

the policy problem

even if watermarking worked technically, who enforces it? requiring all ai companies to watermark means regulation. international regulation. every country agreeing on standards. that's years away if it ever happens.

and it creates perverse incentives. companies that watermark lose users to companies that don't. the competitive pressure pushes against adoption.

what this means

watermarking is unlikely to become a reliable detection method anytime soon. statistical detectors will remain the primary approach, with all their accuracy limitations.

untraceable ai writing through genuine rewriting — the kind paraai does — works regardless of watermarking. because the text is regenerated with human-like patterns, not modified from ai output. no watermark survives that.

the detection landscape will keep evolving. but the fundamentals haven't changed: text that genuinely reads like human writing will pass both statistical detectors and watermark checks.