this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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[โ€“] wischi 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Non breaking spaces and zero width spaces are not watermarks. They are used all the time in professional typesetting and it's actually a good thing that GPT models can do that now.

But of course they can be a tell if you write your work email like a professional type setter but to be fair there are lot of other tells too in GPT outputs.

PS: In fact there are even keyboards (but they are rare) for example for German E1 extension (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E1_%28Tastaturbelegung%29) that can even type those characters. They are used to prevent unwanted line-breaks, for example between numbers and there units or to allow for hyphenation in long words.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah, if you look at the examples, they're all added in places where you ideally don't want the words to be split. This is just a typography thing they added to the output, not an intentional watermark.