AI 中文总结
本文针对生成式AI监管中数字水印的应用，将其从孤立的取证工具重新定位为理解合成内容对媒体生态系统影响的工具，认为该方法的治理挑战比取证场景更易处理。
AI 中文摘要
生成式AI作为廉价且广泛可用的商业服务的出现，以及它引发的AI生成合成内容的浪潮，引发了深刻的认知和社会焦虑，并提出了政策制定者难以解决的治理难题。数字水印是一种既受到监管机构热情支持又受到研究人员怀疑的方法：嵌入在合成内容中的信号可表明其为AI生成，甚至可能识别出具体的生成系统，似乎能提供一种减轻生成式AI风险的途径，且避免了更具干预性策略的弊端。但批评者警告称，水印可能是技术上脆弱、认知上模糊且政治上无效的工具。本文探讨了将数字水印用于AI治理的挑战与机遇，特别关注AI生成文本的水印这一具体问题。我们认为，此类批评常将合成内容识别问题视为孤立的取证问题；相反，我们提议将数字水印重新概念化为理解合成内容对媒体生态系统影响的工具，而非可靠识别单个合成内容的工具。这种“生态系统方法”能更有效地利用水印的特征，尽管该方法会引发自身的治理挑战，但我们认为这些挑战比将水印用于数字取证的挑战更易处理。
英文摘要
The arrival of generative AI as a cheap, widely accessible commercial service, and the tidal wave of AI-generated synthetic content it has unleashed, have provoked deep epistemic and social anxieties and raised difficult governance questions that policymakers are struggling to address. One approach that has attracted both enthusiasm from regulators and skepticism from researchers is digital watermarking. Signals embedded in a synthetically-generated piece of content indicating that it was AI-generated---possibly even identifying the specific systems that generated it---appear to offer a path toward mitigating risks of genAI that avoids the downsides of more interventionist strategies. But critics warn that watermarks may prove technically brittle, epistemically ambiguous, and politically ineffectual tools. In this paper, we explore the challenges and opportunities of using digital watermarking for AI governance, paying special attention to the specific problem of watermarking AI-generated text. We argue that such critiques often treat the problem of identifying synthetic content as an isolated forensic question. Instead, we propose reconceptualizing digital watermarks as tools for understanding the impacts of synthetic content on media ecosystems, rather than reliably identifying individual pieces of synthetic content. Such an ``ecosystems approach'' more effectively utilizes the features of watermarks. And while this approach raises its own governance challenges, we argue that they are more tractable than the challenges of using watermarks for digital forensics.
CommentsAIES 2026
