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How Claude marks AI-generated content

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Re: How Claude marks AI-generated content

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely yes.

But what prevents someone from using Anthropic own detection system to train a watermark-scrubber? Seems like this would only catch the most unsophisticated cases.

Most of the people posting unedited LLM content all over the internet are unbelievably lazy.

Re: How Claude marks AI-generated content

#322
post #256

We need to just stop pretending we can reliably tell if plain text is written by an LLM. It’s just not a reasonable ask.

Now that the EU mandated watermarking, the point is that services (or browser extension developers) can add their own detectors to make AI-generated text obvious. It won't fix AI in print, but most of the problem is online anyway.

These things are trivial to remove though. And the whole point of it is they will also make the _detector_ available so you can then also check if you successfully removed it.

It’s not a solvable problem.

Re: How Claude marks AI-generated content

#323

Many good comments here. It’s somewhat common for me to voice record say a blog post of product updates, more like a ramble. Then have Claude clean it up. Then argue back and forth about certain things until it’s good, then make a final pass sometimes to change a few key words. This is incredibly different than pure ai text. Presumably it will show as ai generated here, even though I would argue it is not really. So…

The watermark is contained in the choice of output tokens. If you exert so much editorial control that Claude has no meaningful freedom in choosing tokens, then it's going to fail to watermark the text, unless the text is _very_ long (in which case even a very low-bit-rate watermark will eventually accumulate enough bits to be positive.)

Re: How Claude marks AI-generated content

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't using greedy decoding, there's enough randomness in sampling to swap some with independent signal.

Purely greedy or not, there is some measure of "goal outcome" that was previously being solved for with the token selection function, and the goal was "complete this text with the best (surely, otherwise what are we doing?) next part, and sometimes the best next part is a little bit random just to keep things interesting" Now the goal is either "identify the meaningless interesting bits and swap them out with 0% loss…

What you're saying sounds intuitively true and from what I've found modern watermarking methods measurably rise perplexity by 1-3% [0]. Gemini convinces me it doesn't matter and doesn't compound over long contexts though. I would love to see HN experts opinion.

[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11348107/

Re: How Claude marks AI-generated content

#325

Many good comments here. It’s somewhat common for me to voice record say a blog post of product updates, more like a ramble. Then have Claude clean it up. Then argue back and forth about certain things until it’s good, then make a final pass sometimes to change a few key words. This is incredibly different than pure ai text. Presumably it will show as ai generated here, even though I would argue it is not really. So…

Simply write your own posts if you don't want people to think they are AI generated.

Re: How Claude marks AI-generated content

#326
post #221
post #15

> When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response. I'd like to know a lot more about how that works. A lot of my interactions with Claude return pretty precise text. If I ask it to edit a project and refactor a specific function in several places I know ex…

Scott Aaronson talks about his project at OpenAI to do this^ You can carefully select which pseudorandom number generator (prng) you use to be able to id text of a certain length. I expect there is some performance characteristic you have to manage since you're doing this on every inference, but once you do that it doesn't change the output in any meaningful way (the prng is still a statistically valid prng, it just…

I’ve always wondered how this works when we only observe the final output and not the internal state that’s used to generate the output.

The LLM presumably generates f(input, RNG) but we only can observe f(RNG).

Re: How Claude marks AI-generated content

#327
post #283

I notice the "Limitations" section talks about how content only at some point touched by Claude may return a positive, and content that returns a negative may still be Claude generated. But I really would have liked for them to state explicitly that entirely false positives where a piece is fully human-written may still be marked as generated, because too many institutions with the power to ruin someone's life over t…

> But I really would have liked for them to state explicitly that entirely false positives where a piece is fully human-written may still be marked as generated Are you talking about pieces that were fully human-written with zero AI editing/rewriting etc? If so, what makes you think that false positives will happen there? They aren't looking for "writing styles" or emdashes etc. They are using watermarks and metadata…

The former. I'm not sure what you mean by metadata, but my expectation was that anything that Claude could put into the plaintext to identify itself may plausibly also accidentally be produced by [a million monkeys on typewriters/one in a million human writers], since in the end, the writing is using the same language and symbols that humans use. How unique could the LLM possibly make it while still retaining its usefulness?

Re: How Claude marks AI-generated content

#328
post #15

> When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response. I'd like to know a lot more about how that works. A lot of my interactions with Claude return pretty precise text. If I ask it to edit a project and refactor a specific function in several places I know ex…

>I'd like to know a lot more about how that works. My guess is that it works like Gemini's SynthID: by altering the logprobs of the next token. Like, for every 10th token, instead of outputting the most probable, it outputs the 17th most probable, or something. (Obviously it's way more complicated but I think conceptually this is how it works.) No human will notice this, but a classifier trained on Claude's output wi…

what about temperature though? Wouldn't that only work if temp == 0?

Re: How Claude marks AI-generated content

#329

Many good comments here. It’s somewhat common for me to voice record say a blog post of product updates, more like a ramble. Then have Claude clean it up. Then argue back and forth about certain things until it’s good, then make a final pass sometimes to change a few key words. This is incredibly different than pure ai text. Presumably it will show as ai generated here, even though I would argue it is not really. So…

But it is not incredibley different than pure ai text tho, it is literally the same as pure ai text.

I understand you're saying since you "worked with it", it is not ai generated but if you still use the final output verbatim, the writing itself is LLM generated purely.

You want to share the output by it but also position it as not ai output. But that's fundamentally dishonest.

Furthermore, if you think your approach actually creates value and can be judged on its merit, why not disclose its ai written? If you think that will make people think your content is bad then you should see that as feedback and maybe not use AI since readers don't like it.

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