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Can it work on code itself? Obviously if you get AI to write the PR description that could be watermarked, but code isn't going to like random unicode, and the sythID approach feels like it would fall apart in the quite strict syntax of most code.

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If a language supports unicode it will have a fairly permissive definition of whitespace, and it will be easy to generate permutations of the whitespace that meet the syntax requirements.

Of course I would want my code formatting tool to normalize that all to plain 0x20 spaces. But it would still be a helpful "brown M&M" test of did you even read CONTRIBUTING and run the code formatter before submitting this PR?

Code submitted to a project should follow the formatting standards of that project and its programming language, which doesn't leave much room for flexibility in whitespace. However, there are many ways to write comments, and many ways to write PR descriptions and commit messages, and often many choices of words to name identifiers, and other potential sources of bits of entropy with no functional impact. It doesn't take that many bits to encode a robust "AI was here" indicator.

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