Our approach to EU text provenance rules

Content provenance helps people understand where content came from, how it was created or edited, and whether it contains signals associated with our models. We’ve already made tools publicly available to identify images and audio generated by our models. Today, we’re sharing our approach to text watermarking in response to the EU AI Act, and how it fits into our broader work.

The EU AI Act requires generative AI providers to make generated text identifiable in a machine-readable way. Text watermarking and detection remain early technologies with significant limitations, and views about their benefits and responsible uses are still developing. Our phased approach reflects both the EU AI Act requirements as well as the technology’s limitations, with an emphasis on transparency about what a text watermark can and cannot tell people:

• Starting today, API customers globally will be able to opt in to text watermarking for select models. Text watermarking will remain off by default in the API.

• Over the coming weeks, we will add an invisible watermark to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union.

• We’re opening applications to access our text watermark detector. Access will initially be limited to approved researchers and expert organizations that can help us evaluate and improve the technology.

  • The above only applies to text provenance—our verification tools for audio and images, including our openai.com/verify⁠ web tool and our Content Provenance API⁠(opens in a new window), will continue to be publicly accessible to organizations looking to understand whether an image or audio file was generated by one of our systems.

How our watermarking works and performs

In our evaluations, textGrain matched or exceeded the performance of other approaches we tested, including SynthID for text. Even so, strong performance under ideal conditions does not guarantee reliable detection in everyday use.