Authorship attribution asks whether a person, model, organization, or combination of contributors produced material. Evidence can include drafts, edit history, provenance records, writing patterns, watermarks, account activity, testimony, and the circumstances in which the work appeared.
A watermark detection result is not a complete authorship test because it may show only that a compatible model influenced part of the text. Fair attribution should account for assistance, editing, mixed authorship, detector uncertainty, and plausible alternative explanations before reaching a consequential conclusion.
ELI5
Authorship attribution is the process of working out who or what created a piece of work. It can consider drafts, writing patterns, saved history, tool records, and other evidence rather than relying on one clue.
For example, a detected watermark may show that an AI model helped with a document, but it cannot by itself show whether the model edited two sentences or wrote everything. A fair decision needs the wider history of how the work was made.
