Anthropic is adding watermarking to model output in response to the E.U.'s AI law. Thompson works through the likely mechanism and argues it's a bad idea on its own terms — the philosophical objection comes before the technical one.
A walk through the identity at the heart of both fields: a good compressor is a good predictor, and vice versa. Uses arithmetic coding to make the equivalence concrete rather than hand-wavy.
Twenty-nine state attorneys general open trial against Meta over claims its products were built to addict minors. Meta's Section 230 defense already failed to keep the $1.4 trillion case out of court.
No program determines truth, but an authoritative-sounding voice that always has an answer is seductive — especially to a tradition already primed to look for a single authority. The argument is about credulity, not about the technology.