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The Biden White House recently enacted its latest executive order designed to establish a guiding framework for generative artificial intelligence development — including content authentication and using digital watermarks to indicate when digital assets made by the Federal government are computer generated. Here's how it and similar copy protection technologies might help content creators more securely authenticate their online works in an age of generative AI misinformation.
A quick history of watermarking
Analog watermarking techniques were first developed in Italy in 1282. Papermakers would implant thin wires into the paper mold, which would create almost imperceptibly thinner areas of the sheet which would become apparent when held up to a light. Not only were analog watermarks used to authenticate where and how a company's products were produced, the marks could also be leveraged to pass concealed, encoded messages. By the 18th century, the technology had spread to government use as a means to prevent currency counterfeiting. Color watermark techniques, which sandwich dyed materials between layers of paper, were developed around the same period.
Though the term "digital watermarking" wasn't coined until 1992, the technology behind it was first patented by the Muzac Corporation in 1954. The system they built, and which they used until the company was sold in the 1980s, would identify music owned by Muzac using a "notch filter" to block the audio signal at 1 kHz in
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