GateTrue

What each generator documents about marking its output

Detection signal: whatever a detector looks for

A detection signal is whatever a detector searches for. It may be an embedded watermark, an attached credential, or a statistical artefact of the model. Pages that promise detection often do not say which. As of 2026-09-22.

Four arrangements a single provenance column would flattenA vendor can write a signal and publish no reader, publish a reader without saying what it looks for, name a standard with a public tool, or describe detection held inside the company. The file-contents cell can look identical across all four.What is published about reading the signalA named public readerA recipient can actA verification platform,or publicly availableinspection tools.Detection held inside thevendorOnly the vendor canactThe signal is real and thecapability does not travelwith the file.Nothing publishedNobody can actMost of this register. Thecell records notdocumented, which is thefinding.Why marking and detection are separate facts here
Fig. 1 Finding a signal establishes something about a file. Not finding one establishes nothing at all.
How this register uses the term, and what it excludes. Written 2026-09-22.
The termDetection signal
What it namesThe thing a detection tool searches a file for
What it is notNecessarily the mark a vendor sells the removal of
Where the register uses itDetection facts, kept apart from marking facts

Inclusion rule. Words this site uses in a narrow sense, where the ordinary sense would lead a reader to misread a cell. No vendor statement appears on this page. Order. Fixed order: what the word names, what it excludes, then where it is used here.

1Marking and detection are separable claims

A vendor can write a signal and publish no reader. A vendor can publish a detector and never say what it looks for. A file can carry a mark that no available tool reads. Those are four different situations and a single provenance column would render them identically, which is why the register keeps the facts apart.

The separation also matters for what a claim is worth. A named standard with a named public reader lets a recipient act. A named standard with internal detection lets the vendor act. The cell in the file-contents column can look the same in both cases.

2What a detector's silence means

Very little, and this is the most commonly misread part of the subject. A file that fails a check may never have been marked, may have been marked by a different vendor, may have lost an attached record in an ordinary re-encode, or may have been generated by a tool that publishes nothing.

So a detection route answers one direction of the question. Finding a signal establishes something about the file; not finding one establishes nothing at all. One vendor here publishes precisely that caveat about its own mechanism, in those terms.

3Why model artefacts are not recorded here

Some detection works on statistical traces of how a model renders rather than on anything anybody deliberately wrote. That is a research capability rather than a documented property of a file, it changes as models change, and no vendor page in this register describes one.

The columns record what a vendor says it writes and what routes it publishes for reading it. A capability that works without the file carrying anything is outside that, and treating it as equivalent would put an evolving research result beside a cited specification.

Nothing on this page is a vendor statement; the values it helps read are on the support table, with the page and the date each one was read from. See also the free tier column, metadata against watermark. Nearby terms: feature grid, cumulative grid, feature icon.