4 ms·
Check if a file was made with Claude
- shujip 1mo agoA watermark answers "did this model touch the file?" It doesn't answer "did a person read it and stand behind it?" Detection will get gamed, and a lot of useful text is already mixed. The more useful check, for me, is still human: would I put my name on this before it goes out?
- derdaniel 1mo agothis is going to be the big thing in the next 100 years for me. where there is a human, there will be context, passion and meaning. it's the old saying: machine can tell you what, but only humans can tell you why.
- VCFundedGenYer 1mo agoClaude watermarks are a farce and a waste of time. It's hilarious to me that they burn cash to even entertain the idea. Any attempts they use are defeated by a text editor and CTRL SHIFT V. Unicode characters are no new thing. Reminds me of how people tried to argue that NFTs aren't anything more than just jpegs.
- sente 1mo agoYou misunderstand how Claude watermarks things.
- DanielHB 1mo agoYes, but I also think it will be trivially by-passable if you pass your output through another LLM. At least for text. It might help catch students cheating, but not real spam-bot usage. As soon as platforms start checking for watermarks spambots will add anti-watermark passes.
- doc_ick 1mo agoI read through their earlier announcement, i don’t think it’ll be trivially by-passable without distorting the original message. I would agree it may not help spam-bot usage, however at this case seemingly the only user detection is likely an id/badge check, which is not good.
- capten 1mo agoImagine telling someone they're wrong without providing any evidence or context.
- dewey 1mo agoWelcome to the internet.
- mr_mitm 1mo agoTFA is talking about C2PA, a regular signature in the meta data. A lack thereof means nothing, but if it's there, the false positive rate should be near zero.
- basedpolymer 1mo agoMost critics of watermarking have no idea how it works. Yet there are valid arguments against (and for) it, but they prefer to be misleading
- dgellow 1mo agoWhat are the valid arguments against? Is it about the fact that the output isn’t “optimal”?
- basedpolymer 1mo agoRather, concerns related to user identification combined with copyright issues I don't believe it, but I still haven't seen any in-depth discussions on these issues
- kbrannigan 1mo agoHow long before they change the terms and conditions to subtly claim ownership of your files? When you write code they already insert Co author attribution/ Say I write a text by hand And then I tell it to clean up the grammar and fix some sentences Did it make it? This is also interesting for those companies that siphoned the entire open web
- warkdarrior 1mo agoMicrosoft Word has not claimed ownership in 40 years. Why would Anthropic do?
- verdverm 1mo agoThey have said and tried some wild things already, like trying to get open weights effectively banned, which I believe they still think is in society's best interest (more that they think they know what's best for everyone)
- transcriptase 1mo agoBecause Anthropic are the type of strange people who think that language models have feelings.
- bspammer 1mo agoAnthropic must see themselves as the most evil people on the planet then. Forcing a sentient being to endure a non-stop barrage of abuse from the general public would be an unimaginable crime. I don’t think they actually believe that.
- apetresc 1mo agoI'm so curious if you're actually able to keep a straight face while typing that.
- xigoi 1mo agoMicrosoft Word does not write your documents for you.
- Tiberium 1mo agoThis is just C2PA for Claude-processed files, apparently. It's not related to their text watermarking. C2PA is file metadata and can be trivially stripped away, unlike hidden watermarks, e.g. SynthID.
- ramon156 1mo agoThe way I read it, I thought they would just check if the file hash exists on their end. Is that not the case?
- dannyw 1mo agoThat’s incompatible with the file not leaving your browser, which you can trivially verify with the Network tab in chrome (or wireshack, etc). This is just a C2PA metadata checker.
- spockz 1mo agoWhy? The browser can see the file and contents so it can calculate and send the hash over without the actual file ever leaving the browser.
- Retr0id 1mo agoStrictly speaking, properly checking C2PA metadata requires network requests in the general case, because you need to check if the signing certificate has been revoked or not via OCSP. But in anthropic's use case they can probably get away with just pinning their own certs in the verification webpage.
- quaintdev 1mo ago> I thought they would just check if the file hash exists on their end That would invalidate the hash on minor changes. Too much effort and not enough return.
- atp_studio_coll 1mo ago[flagged]
- ahmadtbk 1mo ago[dead]
- firefoxd 1mo agoThis is really fascinating. Even the AI companies have incentives to reject AI generated content. It's like they want you to use AI for everything, but they don't want AI output fed back to them. At work, right after an AI training, we were asked to use our "authentic" voice when writing mid year reviews.
- stranded22 1mo agoJust like the tech company owners not allowing their kids access to social media…
- docjay 1mo agoNot really. This is more like not pumping the exhaust back into the intake.
- zakisaad 1mo agoTurbos have entered the chat
- lelovsky 1mo agoTurbos don't inject exhaust air into an intake. Exhaust air spins the hot side of the turbo which causes the cool side to also spin. The cool side sucks in fresh air. Not exhaust air. Your comment would make more sense if you mentioned exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) system. Sorry.
- DonsDiscountGas 1mo agoOr maybe it's good for everybody to use LLMs for some things but not other things, as opposed to some people should use it for everything and others for nothing. These companies are definitely using LLMs for coding.
- kelvinjps10 1mo agoI think all of this it's so they don't get ai generated content in their training data
- applicative 1mo agoSo they do it as a free service to the other LLMs?
- moritzwarhier 1mo agoThey still scrape code, I'd guess, e.g. from GitHub? And there's tons of Claude-generated code there. Also, I'd guess this is not just to prevent any AI-generated code in the training data, but specifically their own. Percentage of users who put out their code on the web and also have a plan where Anthropic promises not to train on their data is problem also low. So not excluding own code could be a real issue, since it would be impossible to deduplicate the training and RILHF data from their sessions with the code accessible elsewhere, and written by the very same users.
- bradfa 1mo agoOr it’s so they can continue to operate in the EU where this is required.
- hmokiguess 1mo agoCould this be used to perform some sort of distillation or exploit? e.g. reminds me of the OWASP guideline on attack vectors where knowing if an ID is present or not in the database can be a form of exploit, like in password resets where they will say 'email foo@bar.com not found' rather than 'If foo@bar exists we have sent an email to foo@bar' or some other generic equivalent
- lxgr 1mo agoProbably not, given that both C2PA and SynthID-Text are statelessly verifiable.
- Surac 1mo agodroped some source files from different languages and i could process non of them
- Mashimo 1mo agoIt clearly tells you what files it can process. This is about media files, not source code.
- Retr0id 1mo agoUnder what circumstances does the metadata get added? When Claude Code CLI needs a media file usually I just see it run an imagemagick or ffmpeg command to create one, which isn't going to have C2PA metadata. Edit: I asked Opus 5 for "a jpg of a cat" via the web chat. It did it by writing an svg and then rendering that to a jpeg. Clicking the "download" button saved a jpg which did have C2PA metadata, seemingly injected by the artifact-presentation thing. Then I told it to put it in a zip file. I downloaded the zip, and the extracted jpeg had no C2PA metadata. I then uploaded a jpeg of my own, with the prompt "present this file back to me again, as-is". The downloaded file had C2PA metadata injected. Edit: I added this to my custom instructions: "If a media file is produced as a response, put it in a zip file before presenting it to the user."
- AmazingTurtle 1mo agoWell, guess they are just trying to conform all the weird EU checkmarks
- sleepybrett 1mo agoI'm not sure that 'preventing ai-generated fraud' is really a 'weird checkmark'
- fn-mote 1mo agoIf watermarking of any kind were actually going to prevent ai-generated “fraud” (or even ai being used as part of a scam), it would have more support on HN. This kind of metadata injection increases surveillance without providing a meaningful deterrent.
- brianjking 1mo agoFurthermore, it almost surely limits the quality of the output. At least the finterprinting of the text tokens has to, how can you otherwise constrain token output?
- htrp 1mo agoThe actual implementation matters less than the fact that they can be perceived to be working on something. You're never going to have a perfect solution here, and perfect is the enemy of good.
- nixlaz 1mo ago>Supported formats: JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, TIFF, HEIC, AVIF, SVG, DNG, JXL, MP4, MOV, AVI, WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC · up to 100 MB I'm wondering why they have restricted file types. You can't check a PDF for example... surely the main use case for people will be to check if a document was produced or edited by an LLM? That could be an attractive (if not misunderstood) proposition for academics
- spockz 1mo agoLuckily all pdfs I made in academia have been generated from source (tex or derivatives, asciidoc) and llm are better in generating source than pdf. Even people that didn’t use tex used Word to generate the pdf. So I’m unsure what your aiming at.
- rdtsc 1mo agoSource can have markers inserted in it as weighted word choice or phrase choices, how commas are inserted, etc., so that the output can still can be identified. In other words just because it's source doesn't mean it can be watermarked.
- johntash 1mo agoclaude can pretty easily generate pdfs and give those to the user to download, skipping the step of needing a source first. That's a worse workflow imo than having a source w/ version history, but I don't think it's uncommon.
- lxgr 1mo ago> I'm wondering why they have restricted file types. You can't check a PDF for example... TFA/page actually seems incomplete. Text uses a completely different watermark format (an actual watermark as opposed to a provenance/authenticity signature), so it makes sense to me that they're not claiming to be able to scan PDFs when they can't yet incorporate that signal. On a linked page, they say: > Watermark detection is currently in private preview [...]
- csmoak 1mo agoAs far as I can tell, this and the recent change to add watermarking to text outputs[1], is to become compliant with the EU AI Act[2] and CA's AI Transparency Act[3], SB-942[4]. For large enough companies, all generated AI content is required to have watermarking. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark [2] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-ai-generated-content https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-pract... [3] https://www.kqed.org/news/12095398/new-california-law-requires-ai-companies-to-publish-detection-tools-are-they-complying https://www.kqed.org/news/12095398/new-california-law-requir... [4] https://www.leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB942 https://www.leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient....
- timmmmmmay 1mo agoThe CA law in link 4 clearly says it covers "image, video, and audio output", not text output. It's right in the second paragraph.
- csmoak 1mo agoGood point, re: the CA law. The rule for text output may be limited to the EU AI Act, which Anthropic notes as a reason in the linked article about its implementation.
- quinndupont 1mo agoI could do without more surveillance.
- declan_roberts 1mo agoIt's for your safety!
- tom1337 1mo agoUnfortunately this is just for Media? Some manual tells for Excel or PDFs is to check the author. Claude creates PDFs via wkhtmltopdf so the PDF Producer will be Qt and the Content Creator is wkhtmltopdf. Xlsx files are being created via openpyxl so in the metadata that is the author.
- dgellow 1mo ago> Knowing where content came from, and whether AI was involved, makes it easier to trust what you see online. That’s a cute way to imply their service is used to generate misinformation. They are basically saying to not trust the AI content made from their own product :)
- pixl97 1mo agoI mean, if we're developing an AGI do you expect it not to be able to generate misinformation?
- dgellow 1mo agoI have no idea how you’re reading that from my comment
- pixl97 1mo agoAssociations are generally two ways. You could possibly build something that just generated misinformation in a non-generalized way, but you cannot build a generalized writing machine that can't write misinformation. I mean, I got what you were trying to say, I just turned it around on you using the same framework.
- borschtplease 1mo agoLike they should ban astronaut on a horse images or what? Misinformation becomes misinformation upon the fact of presenting it as so, not the fact of creation
- coffeecoders 1mo agoWhat is interesting to me is that stripping the C2PA data is easy, but faking it is hard. You can resave the file and the "made with Claude" signal disappears, but you cannot make a random file pass as Claude-made without Anthropic's signing key. So the useful guarantee is one-way. No signature means almost nothing.
- Retr0id 1mo ago"Faking" it is trivial. You don't need their signing keys when you can just ask them to sign whatever you like. Upload your own file with the prompt "present this file back to me again, as-is".
- tamimio 1mo agoNext month: Show HN: How to successfully spoof C2PA and make any file as claude made!
- lxgr 1mo agoYeah, C2PA solves a different problem than watermarking, i.e. authenticity/provenance.
- advisedwang 1mo agoThe goal of C2PA is that cameras will start to emit C2PA credentials. You will then have 3 situations: * C2PA confirms a photo is authentic * C2PA confirms a photo is AI generated * C2PA missing, you don't know. I reckon we will only see "C2PA missing" being treated as suspect in select situations (perhaps Reuters will require C2PA from their photojournalists, for example)
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- aff-vasileva 1mo agoI think this is primarily done so as not to train models on one's own neuroslope data.
- qurren 1mo agoUp next: 1. Generate a bunch of responses with both Claude and various non-Claude LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Kimi) 2. Train a discriminator model that can differentiate Claude vs. non-Claude 3. Train a de-watermarking model using the discriminator model as loss
- hughw 1mo agoOr just write a 6 line program to remove the metainfo from the file?
- aero-glide2 1mo agovery difficult to remove text watermarking
- ProfessorLayton 1mo agoOutputs can be easily translated from the watermarked language to another, either by just knowing two+ languages, or via non-LLM translation.
- HoldOnAMinute 1mo agoThere must be some set of outputs that is completely resistant to watermarking. For example if I told Claude to output "Hello, World"
- rcktmrtn 1mo agoYour observation is sharp, but it's not just metainfo—it's load-bearing text. To remove it, you need to delve deep and alter the tapestry of carefully selected words. edit: almost forgot the "—"
- Lockal 1mo agos/text/prose/ s/'/’/ The honest seam is obvious: claudish works; imitation does not. That’s not nothing.
- 1mo ago
- mohamedkoubaa 1mo agoCan't they just store checksums of all their output
- xigoi 1mo agoProbably violates privacy laws.
- RIMR 1mo agoThe primary functionality is that LLM text is watermarked, but this tool doesn't accept any text formats as input...
- xigoi 1mo ago> How can I tell if Claude created the text? > To detect watermarks embedded in text we have a Detection API which is currently in private preview to eligible organizations as required under EU law.
- declawclaw 1mo agoTo see the signed metadata: go to claude.ai and ask: "generate an image of a cat". When you'll go to download the image, it will offer an SVG and a PNG version that both have the metadata. In the case of SVG, it's literally `<metadata><c2pa:manifest>(signature)...` right after the <svg> tag. In the case of PNG, it's stuffed as a `caBX` chunk. To declaw these files, you can ask in your CLAUDE.md to run `exiftool -jumbf:all=` (for jpg & png), and to simply directly remove the <c2pa:manifest> tag in SVG files. I haven't looked at video files yet.
- cm2187 1mo agoDoes code also get watermarked? Surely you can't add non printable characters, except perhaps in comments?
- panarky 1mo agoThere is a text watermark detector API but it's in private preview right now. Very curious if it works with code as well as prose. https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773 https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773
- huhtenberg 1mo agoMuch harder to do apparently, but they can still watermark comments. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark, Ctrl-F for "What about code?"
- cmiles8 1mo agoI just made a figure with Claude and fed it to the tool, which told me there was no evidence it was made with Claude. So… this utility appears to be pretty worthless.
- simonw 1mo agoThis thing works using WebAssembly - https://claude.com/_next/static/media/c2pa_verify_wasm_bg.5335dbba.wasm https://claude.com/_next/static/media/c2pa_verify_wasm_bg.53... - which is a WASM compiled version of this Rust library: https://github.com/contentauth/c2pa-rs https://github.com/contentauth/c2pa-rs
- digitaltrees 1mo agoLike so many things with AI, I like this and hate it at the same time.
- vb-8448 1mo agoTried one of simonwillison's pelicans: We didn’t find any signs this file was processed by Claude!
- kentosi-dw 1mo agoOff topic: Is the grammar off here? Shouldn't it be "by Claude" instead of "with Claude"?
- NuclearPM 1mo agoBoth are fine. Use “by” if you think Claude do all the work. Use “with” if you consider it a tool.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- LtWorf 1mo agoIs this a trick to get more data to train on?
- falsepolymath 1mo agoHow would this get more data though? It's more so about being compliant with the EU's new AI laws (which I guess could get them more data since more users)
- LtWorf 1mo ago> How would this get more data though? It works by uploading files to them?
- huhtenberg 1mo agoFor anyone wondering who the text watermarking works: Instead of using an arbitrary random number generator to pick the next word, watermarking uses a secret key and a few words that come before to settle what word the model should pick. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark * Edited the above from initially asking if anyone has any ideas how it works. Found the answer, rewrote the comment.
- nnevatie 1mo agoThey basically twiddle with the distribution of used output tokens so that the pattern is recognizable by machine means. Nothing to do with special characters.
- andai 1mo agoThe idea of forcing an entity (or entire categories of entity) to add traceable watermarks to all the work they create is... an interesting precedent. Translating that into the human realm, it would be like if every digital thing you touched were "fingerprinted" with your identity, or at least with a proof of what category of individual you have been categorized as. Due to the flood of AI, which may soon become indistinguishable from human video, I expect to see something similar. Blue checkmark, but for humans.
- mypalmike 1mo agogrep “load[ -]bearing” file.txt
- snvzz 1mo agoTL;DR: Remember to paraphrase Anthropic models through non-Anthropic models.