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Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, kicked off a firestorm by announcing it would start watermarking text produced by the bot.<\/p>\n
CFOTO\/Future Publishing via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Two hundred twenty-five years after Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Post, an AI chatbot bearing his name is now helping readers decide what to read there.<\/p>\n
Open the tabloid\u2019s mobile app, and there it is at the bottom. Tap on the Hamilton icon, and the user is greeted by name with a new screen offering \u201cmore ways to explore the stories that matter to you.\u201d That promise includes an interactive summary of the day\u2019s news, along with a personalized digest of stories tailored to the user\u2019s interests. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor nearly 225 years, the Post has evolved alongside the way people consume news, from print presses to smartphones and now to AI,\u201d Sean Giancola, CEO of the New York Post Media Group, said in an announcement about the new tool.<\/p>\n
The bot named in honor of Hamilton, he continued, is \u201cthe next evolution\u201d of that journey.<\/p>\n
Media companies going all-in on AI<\/p>\n
Across the media business, variations on the Post\u2019s same AI experiment are becoming increasingly common. Netflix<\/a>, for one, is now using generative AI across hundreds of titles. Time built an AI agent around its archive, while USA Today embedded an AI answer engine that lets readers ask conversational questions about its journalism.<\/p>\n Roku in recent days added an AI channel to its free channel lineup, the first fully ad-supported channel featuring AI-generated programming around the clock. Even the commercials are AI-generated.<\/p>\n The Arena Group, owner of Parade, Men\u2019s Journal and The Street, is going further still. The company just rebranded itself as Paradium.AI, it acquired AI content generator InfoSentience and launched its own AI-assisted platform for generating articles and video.<\/p>\n This all comes as companies like Google<\/a>, Meta and OpenAI increasingly want users to become AI-powered media producers themselves, generating images, video, and text-based content with a simple prompt.<\/p>\n But even as media companies like those and others make it easier and more normal to interact with AI tools like the Post\u2019s Hamilton, there\u2019s another movement unfolding in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n Call it AI\u2019s scarlet letter era, as media brands on the one hand encourage widespread use of the technology\u2014while, at the same time, there\u2019s an increasing push to label and even disadvantage the content AI produces.<\/p>\n The rise of AI watermarks and content labels<\/p>\n Spotify offers one example.<\/p>\n The music streamer has just announced a push to start labeling artist profiles built around artificial identities with an \u201cAI Persona\u201d badge. The labels, set to roll out in mid-September, are meant to distinguish entirely AI-generated artists from real musicians who use AI as part of their creative process.<\/p>\n Spotify is also going a step further. Music tied to \u201cAI Persona\u201d profiles will be excluded by default from its editorial and algorithmic recommendations.<\/p>\n Speaking of music, the AI music-generation platform Suno plans to introduce audio watermarking, presumably to make it clearer that the audio wasn\u2019t produced by actual people in a studio. YouTube is also now adding an AI label to otherwise realistic-looking content, even when a creator hasn\u2019t disclosed the use of AI, while TikTok says billions of videos have already been marked as AI-generated there.<\/p>\n If all this wasn\u2019t confusing enough, Google announced<\/a> on Friday that it will now let users remove the visible watermark from AI-generated images, videos and music created with several of its models. The company isn\u2019t abandoning AI IDs altogether\u2014invisible watermarking, for example, won\u2019t go anywhere\u2014but the move adds yet another wrinkle to the emerging rules around labeling AI.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s Anthropic, which is adding an invisible watermark<\/a> to text produced by its newest Claude models. That change is largely a response to new EU transparency rules, but Anthropic is rolling it out everywhere Claude is used.<\/p>\n The news about Claude watermarking kicked off a firestorm on X, with users panicking that AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent “scarlet letter.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI had ditched Grammarly for Claude for proofreading because it does a better job,\u201d blogger Erick Erickson said in a post on X<\/a>. \u201cBut now the stuff I\u2019ve written will be watermarked that Claude did the work. This is ridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n Between the proliferation of AI usage and now the corresponding watermarks and labeling, it can feel like there\u2019s almost a kind of cognitive dissonance at work\u2014in that media companies are conditioning more people to use AI, while at the same time platforms, in particular, are training those same users to be suspicious of what AI produces. Normalizing AI, in other words, while at the same time stigmatizing the output.<\/p>\n