The Unintended Consequences of Dumb Solutions

In urban planning, the idea of the “desired path” is the one that people will take and often create for themselves, which differs from the one that was planned for them. It’s a useful analogy to describe lots of other moments from human history too, if you consider how often humans have implemented solutions to problems that quickly backfired. Introducing one invasive species to control the problem of another rarely turns out well, for example. No matter how often we see it, someone always seems to be coming up with another dumb solution just around the next corner.

Last week’s immediately backfiring idea comes from Anthropic’s announcement, in response to new EU regulation requiring content be flagged as having been created with AI, that they have added watermarking for images and for text to indicate that it was created by AI. This means that not only will images be tagged as having been generated (which is mostly a good thing), but any text created or edited by Claude in any way will also carry the same watermark, regardless of who first created it. So if you write a piece of work and run it through AI tools at the end of a proofread or grammar check or some other type of editing, the watermark will show up and tag the text as AI generated.

“Once again, regulators have forced a solution that creates far more problems than it can ever solve. It will flag the innocent and miss the determined. Worse, it hands institutions a probabilistic signal they will treat as proof. From now on, the text and images you generate or simply pass through Claude will carry an invisible watermark. Anthropic says detection tools are “forthcoming.” That’ll be when the fun really starts. We might as well just call this “False Positives for Everyone.”

Now the next race is on to find tools that allow users to bypass these protections, and perhaps there will be a surge in hiring typists off Fiverr to take AI-edited work and retype it without the watermarks. Regardless, the point is we’re now in the technology era of dumb solutions – and those won’t be so easy to just walk around.