Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 99 posts

Re: Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

#41

Post by dgellow »

SeriousM wrote: post #29

So 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 fo…

> 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

Re: Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

#42

Post by gortok »

Sauce 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.

Re: Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

#43

Post by joenot443 »

317070 wrote: post #15
taurusnoises wrote: post #11

So, 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…

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.

The 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.

Re: Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

#44

Post by 23qsGa1 »

mattrighetti wrote: post #39

Anthropic seems to be on a mission to drive away as many users as possible from Claude

They are probably working on a $500 subscription without watermarks. The majority of their users have an IQ below 100 and need the crutch.

Re: Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

#45

Post by ModernMech »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #21

Well, 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.

Unfortunately the witch hunts don't stop whether you use AI or not. Even if you don't use it, (unavoidable) false positives mean the anti-ai crusaders come for you eventually anyway. Happened in plenty of purity-seeking art communities already, will happen in code communities as well. The people who get hurt are the people just trying to make things. Best not to empower self righteous people with flawed sin-detecting tools, that's guaranteed to turn out badly for everyone.

Re: Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

#47

Post by floppydive »

taurusnoises wrote: post #11

So, 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…

I think its somewhat the opposite of easy to detect patterns in the watermarked text. Regular authors can be statistically fingerprinted and I think we do a rough version of this ourselves. An LLM with dense watermarking may sound less like one author we have a low opinion of and more like an encyclopedia set made by a mix of authors we have low opinions of.

Re: Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

#48

Post by gadders »

23qsGa1 wrote: post #44
mattrighetti wrote: post #39

Anthropic seems to be on a mission to drive away as many users as possible from Claude

They are probably working on a $500 subscription without watermarks. The majority of their users have an IQ below 100 and need the crutch.

It'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?"

Re: Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

#49

Post by ozgung »

joenot443 wrote: post #43
317070 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 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 t…

Do we need the original prompt to recover the watermark?

Re: Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it

#50

Post by sva_ »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #18
twoslide wrote: post #3

Summarising a reddit discussion counts as news nowadays?

What 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.

It's turtles all the way down
Post reply on HN