Your audience will soon know when you’re using AI to help you write copy, create an image, or generate audio… and you can thank the EU for that!

As a result of the European AI legislation, big-tech AI companies will now have to ‘watermark’ AI-generated or edited content so that your audience can identify you’ve used it. AI watermarking is the process of hiding a subtle, machine-readable signal or pattern inside AI-generated content—such as text, images, audio, or video. It is completely invisible to humans, but specialized detection software can spot the mark to identify that the content was made or processed by an AI model.

It doesn’t matter that you aren’t doing business in Europe either, because the major generative AI models like Anthropic and Open AI have advised their users worldwide that their output is being watermarked as AI-generated.

OpenAI say “People are using OpenAI’s tools every day to create and edit images and audio in ways that make communication more expressive, useful, and accessible. As these tools become a part of how people build, imagine, and share, it’s important that people can understand and verify where the media comes from so they can interpret it with more confidence”.

Anthropic have also announced that all Claude models will have embedded watermarks woven into the text. The company’s blog post said “You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality or readability of Claude’s response. Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere.”

Whether we like it or not, the world has been obsessed with AI’s potential to create deepfakes and other malicious content. It means that customers are already more suspicious of the integrity of marketing copy and creativity. According to Walter Pasquarelli, a researcher at Cambridge University, “there is already plenty of evidence ….when it comes to media, that as soon as people know that something is AI-generated, their engagement drops considerably.

As a marketer, is it better for your audience to discover your use of AI as a result of watermarking or for you to be transparent from the start and tell them?

In a soon to be released Code of Practice for Marketing Communications, the NZ Marketing Association includes a complete section on transparent, accurate and authentic communications. The code will advocate that ‘marketing communications created or materially altered using AI should meet the same standards of truthfulness, accuracy and substantiation as any other marketing communication’.

Watermarking it’s a new buzzword in the marketing compendium and is here to support a more trustworthy information ecosystem.

Keith Norris Aug 2026

AI-assisted! 

Author: Keith Norris, Marketing Compliance Consultant, Marketing Association, 18th August 2026