[dragonwriter]

> But I think the most basic of restrictions like mandating watermarks or tracing material of some kind in it might be possible and really that might do a lot to mitigate the worst problems.

Watermarking output (anything that is detectable that is part of the structure of the text, visual--if even imperceptible--image, or otherwise integrated into whatever the primary output is) will make it take a bit more effort to conceal use, but people and tooling will adapt to it very quickly. Tracing material distinct from watermarking -- i.e., accompanying metadata that can be stripped without any impact to the text, image, or whatever else is the primary output -- will do the same, but be even easier to strip, and so have less impact.

[dragonwriter]

And also, mandates for either are mainly going to effect use of public, hosted services; but the proliferation of increasingly-capable open models where fine-tuning and inference can be done locally on consumer hardware will continue and be an additional problem for anything that relies on such a mandate.