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 forcing me thinking for the other person too. Now that time is over.

(It never was hard to spot this type of texts but now there is evidence)

Not sure why Anthropic is getting all the attention here. Google been doing this since at least late 2024[1] and openai I believe is doing this around 9 days ago[2].

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 [2]https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-provenance-signa...

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 brain is kinda breaking here.

From: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-m...

> We'll support users and other third parties to detect Claude’s marks

This is the part that I fear most. What happens with false positives? Will I need to change arbitrary parts of my text if they are flagged as AI generated? Will I be forced to add mistakes?

And then, since LLMs are trained on existing, human-written, quality content, it may be that well-written text gets accidentally flagged more often?

And, if all the providers do this, and they use different watermarks, will I be forced to change things at random until I get a negative from all of those?

I very much think this will yield the wrong signal. There were already some academic plagiarism checkers around that would return false positives, and were blindly trusted by teachers and professors. I suppose AI checkers are all around now, and there will be more of those.

Proofreading is one of the best uses of LLMs that I can think about - I still write my text, then an LLM fixes some of my "errors" since I'm not a native speaker. It usually improves clarity. But now I risk my text to be classified as AI written with potentially bad outcomes.

I don't know whether I should blame the EU, though :-)

Summarising a reddit discussion counts as news nowadays?

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?

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

Will anyone even really care (outside of detecting cheaters in academia)? I see people talking about LLM based posts all the time even at work in Slack conversations where a manager verbatim pastes a clearly AI output as a response for some question and while people seem to care internally they don't actually seem to call them out.

I wondered how watermarks are in the interests of the AI companies, but now it is more clear to me as there are two benefits:

first, they can skip them for training and

second, the AI output can be licensed to reduce, or at least detect, that if output is used as training data for other (more open) models.

Could probably make a 1B model that removes watermarks. Chooses synonyms, trains on user style, changes order around etc.

Amusingly, the 'histrionic' Reddit post linked to in the article smells very AI generated to me. [0]

"And it doesn't stop there. There's the power question."

So not only is the Reddit user in question writing impassioned angry screeds about being caught using AI in their work, but they are presumably asking for Claude's help in writing said prose. I wonder what that prompt looked like?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1vlzjc8/about_t...

This is aimed at academia with all the cheating kids and youngsters. I really dont have a big problem with it but I doubt it will be successful.

Can’t you just paste the copy into an editor that doesn’t support weird characters like EMacs or BBEdit?

Most vendors probably do it covertly, as watermarking is a tried and true method to defend intellectual property. I’m more interested in the motivations behind Anthropic admitting it publicly.

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.

Isn’t this about turning a weakness into a feature? Claude is already unable to write original prose that does not trigger an AI detector like Pangram.

We can already tell when people write with AI, let's not worry! But I guess people are worried the watermark stays even if they completely change what AI wrote

Shouldn’t this count as ‘edited headline’ ? At least when I click on the link it says “Some Claude users…”

Do these watermarks show up in code as well?

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.

Then a whole industry will rise at tracking and removing those watermarks.

Well, um... I fail to see how this changes anything? Give me two random pieces of text, one written by Claude, one not. I'm pretty sure I will be able to tell with close to 100% accuracy which is which, as long as as there will be a non-trivial amount of text.

Claude outputs are already very easily distinguishable. The watermark is already pretty much there, even if it's not explicitly put in the outputs.

Based on Hacker News, other parts of the internet and even some job experience, I've come to the realization that many people legitimately have no idea that their pants are down and everything is on full display.

If you thought you could have AI "reorganize a paragraph" and not have anyone know, you're probably wrong. You can't because Claude can't fucking write even a paragraph without ruining it half the time. But apparently, a lot of people are either literally blind to writing style, or just don't care, because even most "Show HN" posts these days are extremely clearly AI slop with little care, marked and sometimes not marked. If you are fortunate enough to be blind to this (trust me it's not particularly fun, the style is truly grating) next time you're on a cool new project, just search/grep for "load bearing" and have a good laugh. or cry.

Of course, not everyone is necessarily trying to be misleading, but:

- I find this writing style to be truly miserable. It's like equivalently annoying to if the entire world started talking and typing in a slick quick-witted cynical way like we were all living in a Marvel movie script or something. Not exactly like that, but it's an analogy. I now realize some people may not notice if they got swapped into such a world and their parents and friends all just started talking like this out of nowhere.

- I find it disappointing when people don't seem to think they could do better, and would prefer to have an LLM speak in their own voice rather than them. It almost makes me wonder if people are even still alive behind the keyboard. Am I utterly insane or is it weird that people are deciding to have something else speak in their voice? For anything short of a speech or PR it just feels weirdly inappropriate. Even if your English isn't great, I probably prefer your English over Claude's. At worst... I'd probably prefer its direct translation attempt over its own attempt to write something.

I've been having a great time with LLMs but seeing the way people use them has introduced me to the fact that my taste is a lot higher above average than I realized. I'm not really thrilled about that realization, because all it really means is the bar is a lot lower than I thought it was, not that I'm going to win an award for having good taste. (It's not that good anyways. It's just that the depths you can go are apparently deeper than I thought.)

Whenever people respond with "well how do I know you're not just dumping out AI outputs" I just sigh. I've definitely seen evidence that people will accuse things of being AI output when they're not, yet I am completely unworried about either false negatives or false positives. If you really can't tell the difference between "the load-bearing smoking gun" and natural human prose, its embarassing for you, not me.

LLMs in this way deepen my already existing dispair, because they're yet again increasing the disconnect between me and the rest of the world.

This is a dumb idea by Claude. It's currently a binary switch and doesn't differentiate between "fix the grammar on this paragraph" and two pages of AI Slop.

There should at least be some cut off where it applies and where it doesn't.

Yet another (accidental) win for the open-weight models.

I understand their reasoning, but imagine at some point in the future, watermarks eventually lead to a level 9 vulnerability in your system. Theoretically, it is possible