Nice sleuthing!
We do a similar thing to mark documents that are still under embargo and one day I forgot to remove the watermark. The customer complained they had not received the document (a day or two after I sent it), and much searching was done. Finally we found a line in an outlook log on their end that said that the watermark was the reason the file had been put in indefinite quarantine until someone would take a look at it.
That's when I realized my error, and of course it was soon fixed afterwards. It is the first proof that it worked though, so I'm kind of happy about that.
pretty crafty i must say hats off. i will steal this idea if you dont mind!
Feel free! The easiest way to do this is white text on a white background on the last page of the document. If you want to do it on every page do it in the header or the footer. Font size '1' for bonus points ;)
Now I'm curious: what was in the watermark that would trigger Outlook? (I'm having some fun speculating. My guess right now is a ye olde "bu¥ vi@gr@ ch33p!!!!" spam trigger.)
No, it was a bit more subtle than that but I'm definitely not going to post the secret sauce in an open forum. The trick is to trigger the filters in a way that they'll block the mail completely, not just spam trap it.
Aren’t you running a high risk of your own email or other cloud accounts getting flagged doing this? What if your email provider (‘s AI agent) had permanently banned your account?
i think the point is that you're not sending these docs over email, and they never actually trigger the filter they might trigger. if you're emailing docs containing the "don't email me" trap often enough that you get your account flagged, you've got bigger problems.
Joining in on the speculation game: the EICAR string maybe?
Oh I didn't know about this thing, thanks for the discovery.
Amusingly Nathan For You did this in a humourous way back in 2014 (S02E06 - "Party Planner").
remember about aria-hidden or equivalent, otherwise you are making the text visible to screen reader users.
I have read many snide comments and personal ID numbers that way, mostly in public and public-ish documents.
Oh, that's funny. I don't mind people with screen readers reading it. The Venn diagram with 'people with screen readers' on one side and 'people that are about to break an embargo' must be an interesting subset.
AI often goes the screen reader route though..
Probably getting larger and larger with all the agentic workflows popping up as of late.
What's the benefit? It appears that the outlook rejection was unintended. So against llm processing?
The embargo was enforced. This slightly mitigates scenarios where someone accidentally sends a document via email while it is under embargo.
Note also if you cite LLM output on Hacker News, your post will likely get flagged and shadowbanned ("dead"), even if the citation had nothing to do with spam. Apparently Hacker News is using Pangram now to check all comments for LLM content.
You hit the nail on its head! Hacker News has been shadowbanning AI-generated content.
This is not just a spam filter. It's an innovative way to value the human factor—the most precious value in online communities.
Do you want me to pull a poem out of my ass?
Do you want me to
Pull a poem out of my ass
For you to peruse?
Can confirm, got caught by it once. We were discussing if prompt engineering is still relevant, and I copied both the prompt I used and the output I've got. I realized I was shadowbanned because I'm not logged in on every device I use for browsing HN.
I think we can do without people pasting llm generated output into the body of an LLM comment, if people need to provide it for some example, they can do it via a one of the services like https://pastes.io and an outbound link with appropriate description.
Yeah but the comment is shadowbanned (hidden except for the author), so people don't realize that they have done something wrong.
yeah, it would be good if the commenter (if they've never before tripped the no LLM generated text guardrail) could get some kind of warning like "don't do that, and here's why..."
Why is this downvoted???
note that this also applies to ironic LLM-assisted shitposts
I think there should maybe be a little more leeway/amnesty for accounts that aren’t new or don’t have a high rate of LLM tells. IMO if you could self-declare the AI usage and wrap them in <details> tags to handle the verbosity and attribution you could integrate it reaosnably
"Ironic" bad behaviour is still just bad behaviour.
You’re absolutely right
Ironic speech is the main way people make jokes. Sure, ironic violence or something like that isn't a thing outside of WWE, but you shouldn't equate all "bad" behaviors.
In the past we could have said that we shouldn't expect an internet forum filter made of regex patterns to detect irony, but with LLM's as viable modding tools, I'm not sure that we shouldn't raise our standards...
Remember that you can vouch for a flagged post.
I always do this when it is flagged incorrectly, but it doesn't usually help much because multiple people have to vouch.