It seems to me that a model provider who can watermark generated text (unbeknownst to the users) could also specifically watermark generated text prompted by particular users, thus enabling tracking and, consequently, harassment and control of those users and populations as a whole. Bad for anonymity and for free speech.

I hope to be corrected by someone who knows the tech much better than I do.

If you look at how this works under the hood, “when two words that don’t necessarily matter to the context, it will pick one word over the other and a pattern emerges”

And that pattern will be reverse engineered in weeks by a startup

And a downstream agent produced by said startup will be built to roll those dice again and defeat the watermarking

And a the LLM vendors will combat this

And a cottage industry shall be born anew