I recently saw a social post saying that Claude may be implementing a watermark system to tag its content generation, and that ChatGPT is considering doing this as well.
I can’t confirm that this is what I’ve encountered, but I have seen hidden code appear in text that I’ve copied and pasted directly from ChatGPT into a WordPress page editor. It has happened with some text, but not all.
The potential impacts of AI watermarking or tagging are significant. And potentially unfair.
At first, social networks (and multitudes of various online platforms) pushed AI onto us without asking our permission or consent. Now it is a possibility that our use of AI-generated content may eventually be flagged and punished. Punished how and by whom is still up for debate.
As an Aquarius, I can tell you I saw this coming. I saw everyone leap into the arms of AI like this technological answer to all of our problems before the legalities were clarified.
And after I dipped my toes in, I went all in on AI too.
Why?
Because the pace of society, and all of the pressure each and every one of us is continuously under, is too much. Life is too fast, too overwhelming and too hard to keep up with. Ironically, this tool we’ve been given is helping us keep up, while simultaneously pushing everything faster.
Back to the point of this article.
Back in the day, website owners would write their text in Word or WordPerfect and copy and paste it directly into their website, not realizing that formatting code from the original program could be baked into the text. Lines and lines of hidden code could be copied over as well.
This created formatting conflicts between the word processor formatting and the website formatting. Strange things would happen and appear, and this was directly the result of assuming that when you copied and pasted text, you were only copying the text.
Since I actually go way back, having obtained my Web Designer certification in 2001, and learning to design websites in HTML, it was standard practice for me to:
⇒ Copy all text content into Notepad first, and then re-copy it as plain text into the website.
Placing content into Notepad strips away formatting and converts it into plain text.
And in code, every character counts. One misplaced character can mess up a web page, website or program.
Sidenote: I prefer working with Notepad++, which is an advanced text and source-code editor that I totally recommend.
Anyhow, this article doesn’t deal with the legalities of AI. This isn’t even specifically about helping you hide the fact that you may or may not have generated content with AI.
This is a practical tip for stripping hidden, unwanted code and formatting out of your text content, wherever it may have been produced (think Word or Google Docs), or whatever program it may have been generated from (Claude, ChatGPT or elsewhere).
Whether that hidden code is ordinary clipboard formatting, application markup or something else entirely isn’t really the point.
It’s a simple web-design habit that supports the lofty goal of:
⇒ Clean code.
That’s it.
My whole goal is in creating and promoting and displaying Clean Code.
Get rid of all the excess characters and formatting mess, and take pride in your work!
Over and out 🙂
