Does ‘AI‑watermarking’ mean the party is over for cheating students?

Concerns about students cheating with AI are rife in schools and universities.

Some lecturers have even expressed fears that students have been “lobotomized by AI” amid reports AI-detection tools are patchy and far from foolproof. Last week, New South Wales moved to ban take-home assignments for Year 12 to try to stop AI use in assessments.

At the same time, a major generative AI system has developed a way to “watermark” text to indicate whether it is AI-generated. Developer Anthropic has announced the text output of Claude (one of the five big AI tools) will include a hidden label or watermark indicating the text is AI-generated.

Files generated by Claude, including Word and PowerPoint, will also contain an additional watermark hidden in the file itself.

What does this mean for efforts to stamp out cheating?

Why a watermark?

Anthropic took this step after signing on to the European Union’s new AI Act. The act requires providers of AI systems that create synthetic audio, video, images or text to identify the outputs as AI-generated.

Other tech companies, such as OpenAI (which runs ChatGPT), have developed a text watermarking tool but have not rolled it out publicly.

The watermark is not an image superimposed over the text. It is invisibly embedded through the text. Readers will need a “detection mechanism” (yet to be released by Anthropic) to pick up the watermark.

If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.

There are still loopholes

As with AI detection, watermarking can be evaded using other AI tools. The absence of a marker also doesn’t guarantee that AI wasn’t used.

Even Anthropic warns its watermarking cannot tell “whether the text was human-written.” It doesn’t work on small samples of writing. It cannot tell whether AI was used to proofread the work, suggest edits or make improvements. It cannot tell whether a different AI system, such as DeepSeek, wrote the text.

OpenAI has reportedly withheld its text watermarking tool, in part, due to concerns it could negatively affect certain groups, including non-native English speakers.

AI use has been normalized

We know AI use is now extremely common among students. The tools are readily available and free to use.

A 2026 UK survey found 95% of undergraduate students use AI, with 94% using it in their assessments.

Unauthorized AI use is most common in written assessments completed outside of class. Educators have been using AI-detection software to try to screen work for cheating.

A July report from software company Turnitin revealed more than 53% of submissions from Australian university students that were run through its system used some form of AI.

However, an increasing number of institutions have abandoned this technology amid concerns about accuracy, bias, procedural fairness and successful legal challenges from students overseas.

What do we need to do instead?

So it would be unwise for teachers or institutions to rely on watermarking or detection tools to guard against cheating. These technologies can provide a false sense of security. But where does that leave us?

Some Australian educators are warning “detection-based approaches to integrity are not the way forward.” This is because the focus is on policing whether AI was used, rather than on what the student has learned.

Or as University of Queensland educational psychology expert Jason Lodge has also argued, we need to:

Stop looking for evidence that students are using these tools to cheat and shift our emphasis to looking for evidence that learning has occurred.

What happens now?

Advice on alternatives to the “detect and punish” approach has been steadily growing over the past three years. Some of this is via the higher education regulator. It notes:

• We need to prepare students to engage actively, responsibly and ethically in a society where AI is everywhere.
• Understanding what students have learned requires different types of assessment that are fair, inclusive and suited to the situation.

Concerns about cheating and AI use have also resulted in calls to return to in-person assessments. But these aren’t workable for those who study fully online. They also don’t prepare students to engage with AI.

The higher education regulator has also outlined how assessments could change in practice. This includes assessments that are connected and build upon each other throughout a whole degree, increasing in complexity. It also includes at least one “secure” assessment task in every unit or subject across a degree program.

Secure tasks can include oral presentations, in-class tasks and supervised practical demonstrations. They must also include mechanisms that verify the person completing the assessment is the enrolled student.

Who’s behind this story?

Swati Mestri

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space.

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Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.