It is quite just, if you think about it. Human works are copyrighted and protected at the moment of creation. All rights reserved. Yet, LLM outputs are uncopyrightable. Therefore, if Claude or any AI has processed my copyrighted work, the end result is uncopyrightable and in the Public Domain. The public has a right to know: is this a human copyrighted work, an LLM PD work, or is the human falsely claiming authorship in order to retain copyright?

A point of confusion for me, however: is every watermark unique? Is every algorithm for watermarking going to vary amongst models and amongst model versions? Will each model publisher keep this watermarking as a trade secret, that they alone can detect? If so, this can't scale! How do you detect "JoeBob 4.3 LLM" output? By querying every single model's watermark-detector? And if they all work by re-running the model and using tokens anew? That is extraordinarily wasteful.

If a watermark is not self-evident, or universally detectable, then it is no good. Take, for example, US currency. The security measures are published and well known. Any count-out room in retail has a big poster indicating how you can detect authentic US bills. Nobody has to accept non-US currency in the US, and so the only authenticity you need to worry about is your US bills alone. LLM watermarking has none of this in common. Currently sounding like a shitshow, if you ask me.