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Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

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Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#31

Post by dare944 »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #10
smallerize wrote: post #7

Translation: No one can ever again use Claude for proofreading their own prose unless they’re willing to risk that the whole thing might be flagged as having been generated by Claude. I think that was intended, yes.

It is quite just, if you think about it. Human works are copyrighted and protected at the moment of creation. All rights reserved. Yet, LLM outputs are uncopyrightable. Therefore, if Claude or any AI has processed my copyrighted work, the end result is uncopyrightable and in the Public Domain. The public has a right to know: is this a human copyrighted work, an LLM PD work, or is the human falsely claiming authorship…

As I understand it, the current watermarking methods rely on a secret key, making the detection schemes a black box to anyone not in possession of the key. This means organizations like Anthropic are free to make any claim about authorship they want, true or not, and no one can call them on it.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#32

Post by _kulang »

bushido wrote: post #16

This is not meant to be snarky, But almost any writing done by Claude is a perversion of writing. I honestly can't stand the way Claude writes. This watermark change just makes it scarier.

I moved to Sol for my writing and it is so so much better. But it makes more mistakes. I think they have different ideas of product but it seems OpenAI is going to follow Anthropic’s lead over the next year. I think I am going to put more effort into my writing skills to remove myself from this awful situation

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#33

Post by capitalsigma »

lemarchr wrote: post #29

Some here are arguing that mechanisms used by LLM providers already derail the goal of "the very best, most precise words at every single decision point", therefore the author is misguided. The author has expressed a preference. Assume that there is a sequence of tokens, such that it is considered the absolute best by the author. This particular method of watermarking makes it less likely to generate that sequence, b…

If the author has preferences on their "own writing" that conflict with Anthropic's, then they should actually write it themselves rather than paying Anthropic to do it. Private companies don't owe you anything, even less so when they're beholden to laws in foreign jurisdictions.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#35

Post by Alive-in-2025 »

scuppernong wrote: post #27
npilk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a key reason why humans write better prose than LLMs - we can try to choose the best word every time, and go back and restructure sentences and paragraphs if we want. On the other hand, LLMs are forced into picking some likely-ish word, and then have to build the rest of their response to retcon that choice into making sense. Even good human writers would probably struggle with this constraint. It wou…

auto-oulipo

Today I learned a new word, "Oulipo". Interesting.

But what about the general idea that they can watermark results to tell where they came from. The next step is tracking down which user got a result. I hate both of these things. Must everything we do be tracked? Next altering wikipedia results so they can tell who looked at the page or something?

I'd like "the best answer" from an llm and don't want to be tracked, but this isn't for me, it is for them. I understand llm results are already using a varying statistical input so they aren't always the same. But I really hate watermarking and likely tracking too.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#36

Post by hyusap »

npilk wrote: post #19
syrrim wrote: post #9

> I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point. Then bad news: LLMs already use randomness in a fundamental way. Each time they go to generate a token, they first generate a probability distribution of possible tokens. Then they pick one randomly according to this distribution. The technique described can be thought of as making the random number generator pseudo ran…

I think this is a key reason why humans write better prose than LLMs - we can try to choose the best word every time, and go back and restructure sentences and paragraphs if we want. On the other hand, LLMs are forced into picking some likely-ish word, and then have to build the rest of their response to retcon that choice into making sense. Even good human writers would probably struggle with this constraint. It wou…

autoregressive generation doesn’t mean the model is myopic. the next-token distribution can already reflect a longer horizon plan for the output sequence.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#37

Post by Barrin92 »

lemarchr wrote: post #29

Some here are arguing that mechanisms used by LLM providers already derail the goal of "the very best, most precise words at every single decision point", therefore the author is misguided. The author has expressed a preference. Assume that there is a sequence of tokens, such that it is considered the absolute best by the author. This particular method of watermarking makes it less likely to generate that sequence, b…

>Assume that there is a sequence of tokens, such that it is considered the absolute best by the author

You can't assume that because if that was the case he'd already know what sentence to write, because that's what that means.

The notion of a best sentence requires a final cause, an end to write to. By their very nature that's not how LLMs work, so you can't 'degrade' them on that front. They can't lose a property they didn't have.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#38

Post by herf »

Not telling someone you used AI is a perversion of writing. Also agree that an AI proofreader should not claim authorship, but in most other cases, the AI is not reading your mind, it's only watermarking its own usage, and we kind of need more of that.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#39

Post by mholm »

npilk wrote: post #19
syrrim wrote: post #9

> I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point. Then bad news: LLMs already use randomness in a fundamental way. Each time they go to generate a token, they first generate a probability distribution of possible tokens. Then they pick one randomly according to this distribution. The technique described can be thought of as making the random number generator pseudo ran…

I think this is a key reason why humans write better prose than LLMs - we can try to choose the best word every time, and go back and restructure sentences and paragraphs if we want. On the other hand, LLMs are forced into picking some likely-ish word, and then have to build the rest of their response to retcon that choice into making sense. Even good human writers would probably struggle with this constraint. It wou…

This was true in the ChatGPT era. Now we're in a world with reasoning tokens, where a model can thoroughly plan out the response it wants to make. If anything, it makes the style worse.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#40

Post by LoganDark »

walrus01 wrote: post #11

> I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point. Try running an llm like qwen 3.8 27B in Q8 locally with an intentionally very low temperature setting, it will write like a caveman crossed with a robot. You may find that an extremely literal output does not look pleasant to read for humans.

That is not what that means. Generally, precise word choice requires more than autocomplete. Larger models simulate this with hidden layers.
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