Local Man’s Grocery List Now Traceable to Point of Origin
West Chester, Pennsylvania, resident Will Doyle, 82, a retired freelance writer, still puts two spaces after a period because “civilization once had standards.” Doyle learned earlier this week that his grocery list, partially reading “milk, dish soap, ask my wife about that other thing,” may now qualify as synthetic content under European Union Regulation 2024/1689 because he used an AI assistant to check the spelling of “detergent.”
“I checked one word. One,” said Doyle, holding his cell phone at arm’s length as though it had recently arrived from Chernobyl. “Now Brussels is involved.”
Under EU transparency requirements, any text generated by a covered AI model carries a watermark invisible to the human eye but detectable by “downstream verification infrastructure.” This according to a compliance officer who declined to specify what that infrastructure is, where it lives, or who, exactly, is on the other end of it at 2 a.m.
Doyle’s grocery list is now believed to contain what regulators call “provenance information,” although no one contacted by The Pug Bus could explain whether Giant will eventually require Doyle to disclose it before purchasing Tide.
Marlene Fitch, 51, a content-authenticity auditor who keeps printed copies of every Terms of Service agreement she accepts, said AI watermarks should survive “reasonable editing” but not “deliberate obfuscation.”
Asked whether changing “dish soap” to “Dawn” constituted editing or obfuscation, — she could not say, but claimed she would “know it when she saw it,” a legal standard last taken seriously in 1964..
European Union Regulation 2024/1689 is complicating Doyle’s household paperwork. A birthday card containing the AI-suggested phrase “Hope you have a wonderful day” is being held in a locked file pending authentication.
More troubling is Doyle’s unfinished short story, in which AI once suggested changing “walked slowly” to “ambled.”
“I rejected it,” Doyle said. “Does rejection count as interaction? If it does, I have collaborated with a machine by telling it to go to hell.”
EU Article 50 does not currently cover thoughts, feelings, or the seven minutes Doyle spent yesterday staring at a blank Word document doing neither.
A spokesperson said such activity “may be addressed in a future amendment.”
Doyle has since returned to writing exclusively with a No. 2 pencil on a yellow legal pad, although he remains concerned the pencil may have been manufactured using an algorithm.
As of press time, he had crossed “detergent” off the grocery list and replaced it with “sope stuff.”
“I misspelled it on purpose,” he said. “Let Brussels prove I didn’t.”
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