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Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it
- felipeerias 2mo agoIsn’t this about turning a weakness into a feature? Claude is already unable to write original prose that does not trigger an AI detector like Pangram.
- drrcka 2mo ago[dead]
- sylware 2mo agoThen a whole industry will rise at tracking and removing those watermarks.
- pizzly 2mo agoAlready happening. Just have a quick search for llm watermark remover and discovered multiple repos already available.
- d1sxeyes 2mo agoIt’s very easy, just change each third word into something different than what you primarily wrote. It’s very simple, just change every third word for something different to what you originally wrote. It’s very straightforward, just change each and every third word for something different instead of what you actually wrote. And so on ad infinitum.
- twoslide 2mo agoSummarising a reddit discussion counts as news nowadays?
- incognito124 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season
- embedding-shape 2mo agoThe actual original dunk from that page is great enough to be reproduced here again verbatim: > during the months of autumn [...] Work is left to feebler hands. ... In those months the great oracle becomes —what at other times it is not—simply silly. In spring and early summer, the Times is often violent, unfair, fallacious, inconsistent, intentionally unmeaning, even positively blundering, but it is very seldom merely silly. ... In the dead of autumn, when the second and third rate hands are on, we sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing. Sounds like "The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art" where this came from was a wonderful little venture. Is there anything like it today? Feels like "we sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing" accurately describes HN sometimes :D
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- unclebucknasty 2mo agoWhat would really be crazy is if there were a platform on which people provided commentary about other people's commentary on other people's commentary.
- sva_ 2mo agoIt's turtles all the way down
- dgellow 2mo agoBeen the case for more than a decade
- mft_ 2mo agoAmusingly, the 'histrionic' Reddit post linked to in the article smells very AI generated to me. [0] "And it doesn't stop there. There's the power question." So not only is the Reddit user in question writing impassioned angry screeds about being caught using AI in their work, but they are presumably asking for Claude's help in writing said prose. I wonder what that prompt looked like? [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1vlzjc8/about_the_new_claude_watermark/ https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1vlzjc8/about_t...
- fnordian_slip 2mo ago>Amusingly, the 'histrionic' Reddit post linked to in the article smells very AI generated to me. The whole text was a smorgasbord of the worst, most boring AI clichés possible. It was hard to finish for me, even though it is not that long, just because it was so badly written. The only reason why I think it was partly written by a person who is just way too used to AI (as opposed to a simple prompt) is that the gaps in its logic feel more human than artificial.
- armoredkitten 2mo agoYeah this definitely seems like a case of "hey AI, take this mess of incoherent conspiracy-laden rambling points and turn it into something" and the AI had to try and stitch something together that even resembled something making sense. The logic doesn't even hold together.
- pizzly 2mo agoNot sure why Anthropic is getting all the attention here. Google been doing this since at least late 2024[1] and openai I believe is doing this around 9 days ago[2]. [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 [2]https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-provenance-signals-content-credentials-synthid-in-openai-generated-content https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-provenance-signa...
- greatgib 2mo agoThey don't do it for text I think that is the core issue. Somehow it is acceptable for us to have photo, video or audio watermarked but not text or worse code.
- pizzly 2mo agoRealized your right about OpenAI but they plan to. In the link they state "our goal is to expand provenance signals to all modalities including text" so its comming up regardless. I pretty sure Google does it though.
- AureliusMA 2mo agoThat’s what I can’t put my finger on, see my other comment : why would Anthropic tell the public.
- rsynnott 2mo agoThe EU AI Act requires them to do this. It would be pretty weird for them to say "we're not going to do this" while secretly doing it anyway.
- AureliusMA 2mo agoThanks
- port11 2mo agoI don’t think they are: > One need look no further than Reddit to find evidence of brewing discontent, though other posters on the site are not in agreement. It’s a post about some Reddit comments, a nothing-burger.
- kouteiheika 2mo agoWell, um... I fail to see how this changes anything? Give me two random pieces of text, one written by Claude, one not. I'm pretty sure I will be able to tell with close to 100% accuracy which is which, as long as as there will be a non-trivial amount of text. Claude outputs are already very easily distinguishable. The watermark is already pretty much there, even if it's not explicitly put in the outputs.
- taurusnoises 2mo agoSo, it seems the watermark is less what it sounds like (a stamp) and more an "imperceptible statistical pattern woven into the choice of words and sentence structures." Does that mean AI responses will sound even more "AI?" Like, will it become even easier to detect on a read-through because of the word choices and patterning? I see the word "imperceptible" there, but what does this mean in this context? My non-tech brain is kinda breaking here.
- iamacyborg 2mo agoIs it possible for them to sound even more AI?
- dgellow 2mo agoDon’t forget the survivor bias is at play, you don’t see the ones that are good at passing for human written
- iamacyborg 2mo agoSure, but if my experience (I know, I know) is anything to go by, it's increasingly difficult to get Claude to write in anything other than it's own house style.
- 317070 2mo agohttps://arxiv.org/html/2510.20075v6 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.20075v6 It is quite counterintuitive, but you can hide texts the same size as the original text in imperceptible statistics of a text. Compared to that feat, hiding a watermark is very easy.
- joenot443 2mo agoThe information being encoded (the watermark) is the _relative ranking of each token compared to other possibilities_. If our prompt was "Write a positive review for a restaurant" and the response began: "The restaurant " Our next set of predictions might be: [was, had, offers] So we append the rank/index of the next token (0, 1, or 2) onto the secret. Given a long enough response, that secret becomes unique enough to use as a watermark. This obviously relies on having full deterministic access to the LLM itself, i.e. I don't believe it will be possible for users to derive the fingerprint from text that they've generated, only Anthropic will be able to. The immediate objection is that this runs the risk of degrading the quality of the response. I think that's totally valid and I'll be curious how Anthropic handles it. That's my very rough understanding! If someone with more knowledge wants to expand, feel free.
- throwaw12 2mo agoI understand their reasoning, but imagine at some point in the future, watermarks eventually lead to a level 9 vulnerability in your system. Theoretically, it is possible
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoWell, of course. The stigma surrounding AI use will only get worse with stuff like this. I'm not interested in having people single me out for using AI. So glad I switched away from Anthropic.
- datakan 2mo agoDid you write this with AI? jk
- bulder 2mo agoThe stigma surrounding AI use will get worse if... People know AI is being used? Sorry how does maintaining heightened paranoia by omitting clear signals help exactly?
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoI'm not interested in "helping" people call me "slop fetishist" or "clanker lover", thanks.
- fzeroracer 2mo agoHiding your use of AI will only make things worse when people find out. Look at how badly the CEO of Saber Interactive is crashing out after they lied about firing a writer to replace them with AI.
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoI don't hide my AI use at all.
- xnorswap 2mo agoThen why care about a watermark?
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago
- datakan 2mo agoThis is aimed at academia with all the cheating kids and youngsters. I really dont have a big problem with it but I doubt it will be successful.
- SeriousM 2mo agoSo we finally tackle the issue of ai-text pollution and probably found a way to clean up the internet (from now on), yet people start complaining that "their" output is marked as spam. Well, the solution is quite easy: start thinking on your own again and write the lines yourself. I welcome this watermarking. Finally it's an easy detectable signal that someone just generated some request/answer to waste my time by forcing me thinking for the other person too. Now that time is over. (It never was hard to spot this type of texts but now there is evidence)
- dgellow 2mo ago> So we finally tackle the issue of ai-text pollution and probably found a way to clean up the internet We are very, very far from that! So far we have a single ai vendor introducing a statistical bias to their generation that can make it simpler to identify genAI in some (longer) texts. We don’t know yet how effective that will be in practice, and if other models will follow suit
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoIf other AI vendors don't follow suit, then people will move over to them to escape detection. Then of course Claude will stop watermarking.
- dgellow 2mo agoYep. Also, the vast majority of online content is very short (twitter, Reddit comments, HN comments, etc). It’s not something where SynthID type approach will be effective i assume. Still a good first baby step
- AureliusMA 2mo agoWatermarking is probably done by other vendors covertly as well. See my other comment.
- sixtyj 2mo agoThe reason why Anthropic did it is imho the different - they don’t want to ingest their own output again (or somehow differentiate from already stored data) so they try to sign it. The data volume that is generated daily is staggering so every petabyte counts :)
- tornikeo 2mo agoYet another (accidental) win for the open-weight models.
- satvikpendem 2mo agoWill anyone even really care (outside of detecting cheaters in academia)? I see people talking about LLM based posts all the time even at work in Slack conversations where a manager verbatim pastes a clearly AI output as a response for some question and while people seem to care internally they don't actually seem to call them out.
- gadders 2mo agoThis is a dumb idea by Claude. It's currently a binary switch and doesn't differentiate between "fix the grammar on this paragraph" and two pages of AI Slop. There should at least be some cut off where it applies and where it doesn't.
- xyzsparetimexyz 2mo agoDo these watermarks show up in code as well?
- mattrighetti 2mo agoAnthropic seems to be on a mission to drive away as many users as possible from Claude
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoYeah, one would think they'd stop their nonsense given how much competition they're getting. Thank god I've already switched away from Anthropic.
- 23qsGa1 2mo agoThey are probably working on a $500 subscription without watermarks. The majority of their users have an IQ below 100 and need the crutch.
- gadders 2mo agoIt's not a case of needing a crutch. It's how you value your time. "Shall I spend 30 mins grammar checking this product marketing copy, or shall I get AI to do it while I start work coding a new feature?"
- beej71 2mo agoIs someone tasking you with proofing copy? And you're just feeding it into an AI?
- gortok 2mo agoSauce for the goose. Legitimately we should have had this day one for a whole host of reasons (not the least of which is the issue of inadvertently using output from generative AI as training data for Generative AI). But bigger than that is that while there are folks that want to be able to have a machine do their textual output for them with as little energy on their part as possible, the rest of us have to deal with the impact of that call on their part. The purpose of communicating with other humans is not utilitarian, psychologically it is the pathway to connection and forms a large basis of how we are able to get along without eradicating ourselves as a species. Using generative AI to replace that humanity seems unthinkable to me, and having markers that help us differentiate serves as a way to keep others from gaslighting us, which undermines trust and communication. I realize as a stereotype technical folks see communication as a means to a utilitarian end, but it's so much more important than that, so much so that even this small action of watermarking generative AI output can keep untold disasters from occurring because humans didn't know other humans were using it.
- kgeist 2mo agoI wonder how it impacts code generation. It shouldn't impact prose in general because of synonyms and whatnot, but code requires exact reproduction. That is, what happens if you ask an LLM to recite a large, human-written excerpt as is, without modifications? Wouldn't the modified token sampler try to change some tokens here and there (for the watermark to work)? For example, what if I say, "Repeat this text verbatim: %long_human_written_text%"? Would the output be recognized as AI-generated or human-generated?
- spacedcowboy 2mo agoShouldn’t this count as ‘edited headline’ ? At least when I click on the link it says “Some Claude users…”
- jchw 2mo agoBased on Hacker News, other parts of the internet and even some job experience, I've come to the realization that many people legitimately have no idea that their pants are down and everything is on full display. If you thought you could have AI "reorganize a paragraph" and not have anyone know, you're probably wrong. You can't because Claude can't fucking write even a paragraph without ruining it half the time. But apparently, a lot of people are either literally blind to writing style, or just don't care, because even most "Show HN" posts these days are extremely clearly AI slop with little care, marked and sometimes not marked. If you are fortunate enough to be blind to this (trust me it's not particularly fun, the style is truly grating) next time you're on a cool new project, just search/grep for "load bearing" and have a good laugh. or cry. Of course, not everyone is necessarily trying to be misleading, but: - I find this writing style to be truly miserable. It's like equivalently annoying to if the entire world started talking and typing in a slick quick-witted cynical way like we were all living in a Marvel movie script or something. Not exactly like that, but it's an analogy. I now realize some people may not notice if they got swapped into such a world and their parents and friends all just started talking like this out of nowhere. - I find it disappointing when people don't seem to think they could do better, and would prefer to have an LLM speak in their own voice rather than them. It almost makes me wonder if people are even still alive behind the keyboard. Am I utterly insane or is it weird that people are deciding to have something else speak in their voice? For anything short of a speech or PR it just feels weirdly inappropriate. Even if your English isn't great, I probably prefer your English over Claude's. At worst... I'd probably prefer its direct translation attempt over its own attempt to write something. I've been having a great time with LLMs but seeing the way people use them has introduced me to the fact that my taste is a lot higher above average than I realized. I'm not really thrilled about that realization, because all it really means is the bar is a lot lower than I thought it was, not that I'm going to win an award for having good taste. (It's not that good anyways. It's just that the depths you can go are apparently deeper than I thought.) Whenever people respond with "well how do I know you're not just dumping out AI outputs" I just sigh. I've definitely seen evidence that people will accuse things of being AI output when they're not, yet I am completely unworried about either false negatives or false positives. If you really can't tell the difference between "the load-bearing smoking gun" and natural human prose, its embarassing for you, not me. LLMs in this way deepen my already existing dispair, because they're yet again increasing the disconnect between me and the rest of the world.
- alanfranz 2mo agoFrom: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-m... > We'll support users and other third parties to detect Claude’s marks This is the part that I fear most. What happens with false positives? Will I need to change arbitrary parts of my text if they are flagged as AI generated? Will I be forced to add mistakes? And then, since LLMs are trained on existing, human-written, quality content, it may be that well-written text gets accidentally flagged more often? And, if all the providers do this, and they use different watermarks, will I be forced to change things at random until I get a negative from all of those? I very much think this will yield the wrong signal. There were already some academic plagiarism checkers around that would return false positives, and were blindly trusted by teachers and professors. I suppose AI checkers are all around now, and there will be more of those. Proofreading is one of the best uses of LLMs that I can think about - I still write my text, then an LLM fixes some of my "errors" since I'm not a native speaker. It usually improves clarity. But now I risk my text to be classified as AI written with potentially bad outcomes. I don't know whether I should blame the EU, though :-)
- glasshug 2mo agoThird-party “AI checkers” and LLM watermarking at generation are a bit different. I’d suggest you read some of the methods; they’re approachable to someone on this forum. False positives aren’t really a failure case with good params. False negatives, sure.
- AureliusMA 2mo agoMost vendors probably do it covertly, as watermarking is a tried and true method to defend intellectual property. I’m more interested in the motivations behind Anthropic admitting it publicly.
- amai 2mo agoThey just want to blame the EU for something did secretly the whole time. In fact as Google they watermark AI generated data to filter it out of their training sets.
- kjshsh123 2mo agoCould probably make a 1B model that removes watermarks. Chooses synonyms, trains on user style, changes order around etc.
- Luucas40 2mo agoWe can already tell when people write with AI, let's not worry! But I guess people are worried the watermark stays even if they completely change what AI wrote
- karussell 2mo agoI wondered how watermarks are in the interests of the AI companies, but now it is more clear to me as there are two benefits: first, they can skip them for training and second, the AI output can be licensed to reduce, or at least detect, that if output is used as training data for other (more open) models.
- hellisothers 2mo agoCan’t you just paste the copy into an editor that doesn’t support weird characters like EMacs or BBEdit?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- apple4ever 2mo agoGood. Tired of all the slop out there. (And before someone complains, I use Claude. But as an assistant occasionally. Not as everything. )
- jannw 2mo agoyou can remove AI company invisible text watermarks at www.demarkify.com - and also perform other tonal text changes like removing AI lexical tells