What does AI watermarking of digital content mean?

Update of 8/21/2026: How Claude’s text watermark works "... we, along with several other major AI providers, are implementing this change to comply with the EU AI Act. ... 

Claude’s text watermark is a version of the SynthID-Text approach published by Google DeepMind in a Nature paper in 2024. It belongs to a family of approaches that go back to a proposal by Scott Aaronson in 2022, all of which share the same design principle that we described above—the watermark only changes the source of the randomness used to pick among words. ..."

The term watermarking in the digital age seems to be an oxymoron and antiquated  itself! It sounds very cute, familiar too many and may convey reliability and peace of mind to some.

However, when it comes to e.g. text content is such watermarking feasible and robust? I have serious doubts. Apparently one simple technique seems to be to insert unusual/unexpected terms into a sequence of regular/usual terms. 

With other media/content like photos, images or video this might be more feasible.

Or are some tech companies just primarily trying to please some ridiculous EU regulations? You bet!

Yale University director stole $40M in electronics from the university to buy luxury cars, real estate, and travel for almost a decade

An elite universities trusted his employee and neglected to verify by audit! This is a spectacular case!

It also appears it was the tax fraud committed that turned this criminal in and not the theft itself by the university!

You wonder how many other cases there at U.S. universities with less than $40 million and over 8 years of crime!

"... In addition to causing $40,504,200 in losses to Yale, Petrone caused a loss of $6,416,618 to the U.S. Treasury by failing to pay taxes on the money she received from selling the stolen equipment. ...
[the employee] was arrested in September 2021 but has since been released upon payment of a $1 million bond. She now awaits sentencing scheduled for June 29."

Yale director stole $40M in electronics from the university to buy luxury cars, real estate, and travel — she wasn't caught for almost a decade - TheBlaze