AI watermarking is raising the value of human writing, not killing it

Everyone loves the unmasking of a literary fraud. Words that were at one point lauded, in books presumably flying off shelves, are suddenly not worth the paper they’re printed on. The words didn’t change but the story of how they were made did.

Claude wasn’t the first AI to watermark its copy, that honour goes to Gemini, but Claude seems to be a better writing tool and so it has garnered more attention with the move this month to comply with European laws and watermark its copy. It doesn’t just apply to generated copy but also any copy it edits. Basically any copy it has a hand in producing.

AI is good at writing, when you guide it the right way. I’ve been a professional writer for 32 years now and it pains me to see but AI produces great copy for the most part (aside from its annoying tendency to speak in Silicon Valley English).

I’ve seen the improvements out in the wild over the last couple of years. I judge this by seeing less and less bad writing. From internal emails to advertising copy, general standards are improving. I put it down to AI.

But aren’t we all collectively engaging in a bit of fraud by using AI to improve our work if we don’t say so? And does it matter? Well yes, because it moves both ways now. My original work, edited by AI will also get watermarked. Watermarking is a start, even better provenance processes are the answer.

What Claude (and Gemini) have done by watermarking copy is to raise the bar even more. Why? Because good writing has just been given a huge premium. We’re hopefully no longer going to tolerate the word salads we were used to in the past (no thanks to SEO). Improving provenance will highlight genuine creative processes and call out laziness.

As an agency that charges money for words I’ve been worried about what will happen to our business model. A couple years ago written work started disappearing from our billings. But lately it has started coming back. And I think it is because of the way creative work in general is valued.

While the tools of creation have sent the cost of production starkly lower, the wider availability of those tools have started to have an impact on demand, growing the size of the market looking for genuine creative services. Fingers crossed.

Provenance makes us all better. Watermarking copy will only increase the value of providing genuine creative judgement as a service. I don’t think too many people care how much of their marketing copy is written by machine or a person, but they want to know who is answerable for it.

Knowing its creation chain will add to how we all value the process of creativity. Who was shaping this outcome? How did they do it? Like the storied animation house Pixar’s strict creative process shows, a great creative methodology will be an asset.

Actor Cate Blanchett’s Human Consent Registry launched in June to help individuals regain control over their attributes and likeness is another example of the way provenance tools can help regain some control for creators, public, and not-so-public figures.

An initiative such as Blanchett’s, through her non-profit RSL Media, answers one of the great fears I’ve had as a creative, the idea of agency. I mean that’s a lot of why I became a writer in the first place. I wanted my work to give me a freedom other jobs couldn’t. AI took away that ability to differentiate myself because I was a "writer".

I realised later that my judgement as a writer was where the value lay, so I could look at a piece of AI-written copy and see where it was off, make it better. Provenance gives me that agency back because my role is more visible.

The debate internally at Click2View is whether writing is dead. I don’t think it is dead, in fact, I’m writing more than ever, particularly by hand. I think the value of great human writing is about to be recognised anew.

Good writing should become the norm, with help from AI. And hopefully bad writing will be consigned to the human learning process.

This article was written by Simon Kearney, founder and CEO of Click2View.