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

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

#51

Post by xtiansimon »

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…

> "imperceptible statistical pattern”

This is how I’m feeling right now.

A “watermark” is as an author’s mark. I struggle to understand how a myriad of different texts will produce the same watermark output. How big does a text have to be to generate this sign? What is the false positive rate (where my own authentic prose—gasp—is falsely accused of being AI). How do you “prove” it’s true? Will Anthropic offer some kind of service?

I find ChatGPT to be overly loquacious, and my preference for Claude is the brevity of output. Does this mean I will now have to suffer Claude’s gibbering, too?

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

#52

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

Supposedly you can avoid degradation by using synonyms. But not all words have synonyms. The more concrete and factual the prose, the harder it is to watermark. "Cow" is not a synonym for "cat" and "dark matter" is not a synonym for "galaxy."

So the watermark words will be biased towards filler and fluff where invisible substitutions are easier, and the content is less (cough...) load-bearing.

The likely outcome is the development of AI watermark strippers which filter out all the twitches and tells that make default AI writing so annoying.

Google seem to have given up on SynthID for text for now, so this is likely a harder problem than it looks. My guess is Anthropic announced this to meet regulatory requirements. But they don't have a robust detector, and I seriously doubt they have a robust system that can survive trivial rewriting by a different model.

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

#53

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

dgellow wrote: post #41
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

If other AI vendors don't follow suit, then people will move over to them to escape detection. Then of course Claude will stop watermarking.

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

#54

Post by bagelcollie »

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…

From my understanding, AI outputs have patterns due to its text prediction algorithm and AI detectors just recognize those patterns as watermarks. If there used to be 1,000 different ways to write a paragraph, watermarks may reduce it to 300 and that’s still a lot. Humans shouldn’t be able to perceive these changes except the output is really short.

https://www.seangoedecke.com/text-ai-watermarks/

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

#55

Post by kgeist »

I 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?

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

#56

Post by matheusmoreira »

xnorswap wrote: post #40
matheusmoreira wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't hide my AI use at all.

Then why care about a watermark?

Because it's yet another signal prejudiced people get to use against me to dismiss my projects as slop.

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

#57

Post by dgellow »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #53
dgellow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

If other AI vendors don't follow suit, then people will move over to them to escape detection. Then of course Claude will stop watermarking.

Yep. 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

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

#58

Post by sixtyj »

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…

The 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 :)

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

#60

Post by matheusmoreira »

ModernMech wrote: post #45
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…

Agreed... How did the art community deal with the witch hunts?

In my case the consequences are mounting. I've already essentially abandoned two communities over it. I'm sitting on human reviewed and tested mesa patches I can't bring myself to submit to upstream because of the AI stigma. I was using AI to revive some of my GCC work as well but abandoned it after their policy announcement. There seems to be no end in sight.

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