Who Gets Flagged? The Pluralistic Evaluation Gap in AI Content Watermarking

Computer Science > Computers and Society [Submitted on 15 Apr 2026] Who Gets Flagged? The Pluralistic Evaluation Gap in AI Content Watermarking Alexander Nemecek, Osama Zafar, Yuqiao Xu, Wenbiao Li, Erman Ayday Watermarking is becoming the default mechanism for AI content authentication, with governance policies and frameworks referencing it as infrastructure for content provenance. Yet across text, image, and audio modalities, watermark signal strength, detectability, and robustness depend on statistical properties of the content itself, properties that vary systematically across languages, cultural visual traditions, and demographic groups. We examine how this content dependence creates modality-specific pathways to bias. Reviewing the major watermarking benchmarks across modalities, we find that, with one exception, none report performance across languages, cultural content types, or population groups. To address this, we propose three concrete evaluation dimensions for pluralistic watermark benchmarking: cross-lingual detection parity, culturally diverse content coverage, and demographic disaggregation of detection metrics. We connect these to the governance frameworks currently mandating watermarking deployment and show that watermarking is held to a lower fairness standard than the generative systems it is meant to govern. Our position is that evaluation must precede deployment, and that the same bias auditing requirements applied to AI models should extend to the verification layer. Comments: 7 pages Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) Cite as: arXiv:2604.13776 [cs.CY]   (or arXiv:2604.13776v1 [cs.CY] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.13776 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Alexander Nemecek [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:06:56 UTC (36 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CY < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL cs.CR cs.CV References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)