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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

#711

Post by matheusmoreira »

josephg wrote: post #679
matheusmoreira wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Got any evidence for that claim? Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jobs requiring higher education pay roughly 2x more than those requiring high school education and roughly 3x more than those requiring no education at all. And even if there's no formal requirement for a degree, it doesn't automatically mean people lacking degrees will get hired either. Anyone who wants to get a well paying white collar job pretty much n…

> Jobs requiring higher education pay roughly 2x more than those requiring high school education This isn’t really evidence either way. Why do companies pay twice as much for people with higher education? We can’t tell from that statistic. Maybe it’s what you learn in class that makes you twice as valuable to potential employers. > how did they get the job? Networking? Probably. After all, that’s how most people in o…

> This isn’t really evidence either way.

I claimed job prospects is the biggest reason why people spend years educating themselves. Evidence of 2-3x higher salaries directly supports that by providing an excellent motive.

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

#712

Post by josephg »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #711
josephg wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jobs requiring higher education pay roughly 2x more than those requiring high school education This isn’t really evidence either way. Why do companies pay twice as much for people with higher education? We can’t tell from that statistic. Maybe it’s what you learn in class that makes you twice as valuable to potential employers. > how did they get the job? Networking? Probably. After all, that’s how most people in o…

> This isn’t really evidence either way. I claimed job prospects is the biggest reason why people spend years educating themselves. Evidence of 2-3x higher salaries directly supports that by providing an excellent motive.

I can imagine two different reasons for the higher salaries. Companies may genuinely think higher education makes their employees that much more productive. And you see that in their hiring process.

Or the degree is something else. A marker of status. Or a signal of IQ and conscientiousness, since companies are legally barred from directly issuing IQ tests.

An observation of 2-3x higher salaries for graduates doesn't differentiate these two theories.

But rereading your comments, maybe that was never your argument. You said:

> The learning is entirely secondary. The cheating will stop when there is no longer any economic incentive to be there in the first place.

Companies might be entirely rational in offering 2-3x higher salaries to people with degrees. If that is the case, it's not just a meme. And the economic incentive will remain indefinitely. And universities and companies aren't doing anything wrong here.

Throughout your career, on the job performance matters a lot more in aggregate than your CV. Most people are hired from referrals, after all. If students value the degree over the education itself, they're cheating themselves out of all the benefits - economic and otherwise - that education can provide them throughout their career.

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

#713

Post by lluisantoni »

einpoklum wrote: post #401
lluisantoni wrote: post #382

Text watermarking is another EU rule made without real world input. The Union is stuck on major economic crises (electricity prices for instance) because nobody can agree on anything. However, the bureaucracy forces tech into a privacy nightmare. Brussels cannot bring together its own members but it loves pretending it can govern the internet.

> (electricity prices for instance) because nobody can agree on anything. I would say that's more like because the US has arranged for Europe's fossil fuel energy sources to be disrupted or cut off: * Libya - NATO made a pig's breakfast of that, it's a failed state now. * Iran - transitive sanctions, because why not prevent non-US states from trading with each other. * Russia (& Kazahkhstan) - The US (with or without…

[dead]

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

#714

Post by mikewarot »

Doc Searls, the long time Editor-in-Chief of the Linux Journal, brings an editors viewpoint to this, and mixes in a number of other voices.[1]

Many writers use AI to edit their own words, and this watermarking poisons the well for that use.

I think the backlash from this could be the seed that undoes their attempted 2 Trillion IPO this fall.

[1] https://doc.searls.com/2026/08/17/you-can-hear-the-squeak-of...

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

#716

Post by kylebebak »

georgelyon wrote: post #587
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…

Another good way to think about this is that it does change the output, but in a way that is equally likely to make it "better" as it is to make it "worse".

That is not a good way to think about this. I don't have deep knowledge of how LLM's work, but the following is accurate enough to illustrate the point.

Let's say the LLM is in the middle of text generation and "decides" that the next token is "dog" with p=0.55, or "cat" with p=0.45. With a temperature of 0, the model always picks dog, because it's the most likely next token. With a temperature of 1 the model picks dog 55% of the time and pick cat 45% of the time.

With this watermarking scheme, the model might alter these probabilities s.t. p_dog for this particular generated token goes up or down. Let's say it does down, s.t. p_dog is now 0.45 and p_cat=0.55. Now, with T=1 the model picks cat 55% of the time and dog 45% of the time. Regardless of whether the "watermarking function" raises or lowers p_dog, the probability distribution for this token has changed, and whatever math this trillion dollar company and its brainiacs came up with to decide that p_dog ought to be 0.55 has been "adulterated". As others have mentioned there is no way around this.

---

Regarding the watermarking scheme, it works because it doesn't just alter p_dog for this single output token. It alters probabilities for many of the generated tokens (it could do this to all of the output tokens; it's an implementation detail). E.g. at token N, it favors "cat", at token N+1 it favors "house", etc. This way, if you have the secret key that lets you generate the watermarking function for any output token, you can analyze a run of tokens and check whether it's likely they were generated according to your watermarking scheme. The longer the run of tokens, the more certain this check becomes (it becomes extremely certain quite fast).

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

#717

Post by abustamam »

tempestn wrote: post #696
abustamam wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that depends on the distribution of good choices and bad ones. There may be 10 choices and maybe 8 of them could be appropriate given a context, and 2 are absolutely nonsensical. Or it could be vice versa. And its a spectrum as well.

But the choices are weighted based on those probabilities. This doesn't affect the weightings, only how the final weighted pseudo-random selection is made.

Right, but that's what makes me doubt this statement in the comment I was replying to

> The probability that SynthID changes the best choice to a worse one is equal to the probability that it changes a worse choice to the best one.

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

#718

Post by daishi55 »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #491
daishi55 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude has those knobs, they are just not exposed to the user. They could make Claude nearly completely deterministic if they wanted to (of course it would be a far inferior product then. But they could).

“Not exposed” = has no knobs. Of course all autoregressive LLMs can be operated this way but Claude, the product, employs LLMs but isn’t one.

Your original statement “LLMs use randomness in a fundamental way” is incorrect. LLMs have these knobs and randomness is not an inherent property of LLMs.

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

#719

Post by solid_fuel »

redfloatplane wrote: post #684
solid_fuel wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freaking out about basic EU privacy and safety measures is always one of the biggest red flags that someone is becoming a politically motivated hack, especially when that someone lives in the US where there is an active fascist movement tearing apart the government.

But what if those measures might apply to your favourite multi-trillion-dollar globo-corp and cause them to nominally change their business practices? That's a step too far, I say.

Oh, well then it must be stopped by any means necessary of course! Thank god there are brave and concerned citizens like John Gruber, ready to hold the line against the tyranny of regulations.

After all, if it wasn't for him who would ever speak up for the trillion dollar corporation? Without brave heros like him, these poor vulnerable corporations would be facing all sorts of attacks from evil regulatory organizations and their dastardly scientists. Just think of the profit - all those euros - that may be lost like chaff in the wind.

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

#720

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

saltwatercowboy wrote: post #489
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why detectors like Pangram exist too I think.

Pangram doesn't work.

what do you mean by "work"? I think it works perfectly as UGC honeypot.
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