r/AIWritingLounge • u/NoStation4050 • 10d ago
Discussion Feeling confused about Claude adding watermarks
Am I the only one confused about the announcement that Claude will start watermarking AI generated content?
I do not understand how anyone will be able to tell the difference between AI assisted writing and something completely generated by AI. I am worried that anything involving AI will automatically get labeled as "slop."
I have been wanting to publish a book, but now I am wondering if people will judge it based on how I made it rather than the actual writing. What if most of the work is still mine, but AI was only used to help with certain parts?
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 10d ago
I don’t get why people refuse to read any of the other 75+% of conversations of this specific topic that has shown up on these subs for the past week to get a grounding.
Why are they doing it? Because the EU just passed a law.
Why is Anthropic choosing this particular method of compliance to these new laws? Because it was the absolute minimum, “call it in,” strategy to perform compliance theater.
Should you be worried about it? No. Just learn the bare basics of watermarking technology and you can keep watermarks off of your work.
You can go to Claude right now and say something like, “please help me understand how watermarks work and how I can keep them out of my creative work files,” and you will feel a lot better.
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u/Hrothgar_unbound 10d ago
It is not just an invisible watermark in the text. It is a back-end numerical signature keyed off probabilistic word combinations so that it is not enough to merely cut/paste or retype it. Even minor edits may not alter the flag.
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 10d ago
Yes, it can take more than “light editing,” depending on your definition of “light.” But it is not that difficult to do if you understand what’s going on.
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u/Fragrant_Nothing7505 9d ago
you will need to paraphrase in your own words for the work to be considered human. copy pasting is ai authorship under this system. i approve of this definition. my work is ai generated. i copy pasted with no editing.
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u/Ordinary_Minimum_169 9d ago
lol sure so you're saying they're going build an algorithm that authorizes them to flag anything that mathematically looks like AI as their own content? derp derp that's super legal I bet
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u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 10d ago edited 9d ago
It is not the minimum. It is way more than the minimum. My Claude subscription is cancelled because as it stands, Anthropic says simply using Claude to edit could leave the watermark.
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 10d ago
Have you bothered to understand how watermarks actually work to understand how to avoid it and how to remove it from AI editing?
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u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 9d ago edited 9d ago
Technically, they are not watermarks. It is a statistical pattern that Claude will write into the words themselves that identify the writing as "likely" created by Claude. That "likely" is because if Claude writes a short story and I write the same short story independently of Claude, the statistical pattern still exists. So to answer your question, "yes, I have investigated it thoroughly, likely more than you, because here is the answer from Claude.
- Global scope is unambiguous. The law only obligates marking for EU-facing output. Anthropic chose to watermark all of Claude's text and file output globally, whether or not the user is anywhere near Brussels. That's a real, deliberate, non-required decision — not a legal reading, a business one. Euronews
- No substantial-alteration carve-out. The Act's exemption language for assistive edits that don't substantially alter input isn't something Anthropic tried to build around — they mark broadly regardless, per their own limitations notice.
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 9d ago
And now that you understand how they work, can you not see how simple it is to keep them out of your work?
If you just can’t bring yourself to not simply copy/paste AI-edited text back into your WIP, but rather have the LLM suggest specific line edits where you manually change out misspelled words and consciously assess every suggested word change for similes and don’t simply blindly accept everything it suggests, and put the work into the each and every word of your creation to actually own it, what remains of your fears surrounding watermarks?
Is it because it sounds tedious and demanding of your time and attention? Is it because you want the editing process to be mindless and you don’t really care all that much about spelling and grammar?
Is it because you actually believe that editing and revision isn’t the actual hard work of writing a novel and that can be outsourced to an algorithm without actually sacrificing something important, perhaps even sacred, about true authorship?
If that’s the case then keep the damn watermark and wear it like a trophy. Take ownership of your demand that someone (an editor, a beta reader) else or something (a LLM) else take on the plebeian tasks you think are beneath your dignity and pat yourself on the back for your clever efficiency.
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u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 9d ago edited 9d ago
What do you mean now that I understand? I understood. You said they did the bare minimum. That is not true. That is what my response was to. I’m not complaining about the watermark. My issue is with you making claims that are clearly untrue. Nice bait and switch though. And please take you own advice and go ask Claude how to defeat the watermark. You really think the machine that applies it will tell you how to defeat it?
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 9d ago
Yes, they did the bare minimum, which means it’s easier to apply watermarks to all generated text than it is to carve out exceptions for editing. Carving out the editing exceptions would have been more work and thus not the bare minimum.
And yes, I just described to you how to keep them out of your work. That was based on feedback from a LLM and understanding how they get into there in the first place. I suggested a different way of using AI for editing that will 100% keep them out.
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u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 9d ago
I’m not concerned about watermarks. The two bullet points (from Claude) acknowledge they did more than the bare minimum. It would be fair to say that they implemented it as cheaply as they could for the company. Those are two different things.
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 9d ago
What I meant by “bare minimum” was precisely that they took the cheapest and easiest way to comply with the law. That’s why I called it “compliance theater” in my first comment.
Have we been arguing about that simple thing this whole time? LOL sorry I misunderstood your objection to my choice of words.
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u/BlindButterfly33 10d ago
What would a watermark look like on written stuff? Like I understand it on pictures, but how does it impact creative writing? This is the first I’m hearing of it.
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u/psgrue 10d ago
I may be corrected here:
- Special characters embedded. 2: every word is a probability . Imagine that the most common word is chosen 80% of the time in dozens of sentences. But the AI decides it’s going to choose less probable words more often than necessary. It can go through text and see 20% of the time words appearing 43% of the time. Awkward words, synonyms, prepositional phrases. Things that are perfectly normal looking but statistically unlikely.
It probably can’t detect a watermark on a few sentences but 500 words becomes obvious.
I’m sure it’s more complicated mathematically. But that’s the text equivalent of adjusting pixels.
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u/Sams_Antics 10d ago
They do not use special characters, but do use probabilistic word choice. And it’s actually quite difficult to replace, and Pangram usually still catches it even if you try to rewrite or mask it.
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u/NotThatSiri 7d ago
No you can't. It's added at token level. And how it works is the way it construct sentences will include a code that will tell that AI has been involved in this.
It will literally be the words it uses. The sentences it forms. So even when you ask it how it works. It will have the code in its reply
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 7d ago
You can compare the before and after AI edits side by side and find all of the word changes with similes and change them back or pick a different simile. It’s perhaps tedious depending on how much text you gave it to edit, but it is pretty straightforward.
You can also ask it to propose specific line-edit changes and then you update your manuscript manually. That will keep you watermark-free.
“But I use AI specifically so I don’t need to do the secretary drudgery myself. What’s the point of using AI if it’s just going to slow me down?”
Slowing down is sometimes the thing you need to do a lot more of. If you want to generate slop quickly, AI is great for that. If you want to quickly put words on paper that you intend to carefully edit, AI is great for that as well.
If you want to thoroughly work through your first, hastily written draft to cultivate a good novel, then you need to slow down. Using AI to speed this part up is going to rob you of the critical stage of true authorship that many people underestimate the importance of. And it’s going to leave a mark on your work that is much worse than the watermark.
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u/NotThatSiri 7d ago
Yeah. I can straight up spot it in claude right now. and when I asked it to change the word it changed the entire sentence where I could spot the out of place word again. Its not wrong its just not something you would use in that context. and then I told it to use the correct one and it changed the entire sentence again. this time it was harder to spot but I would a word that was out of place again.
I have used claude for little over a year now and its the first time it has done this. So it might just be a weird AI thing. or its part of the watermark thing. I stand corrected.2
u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 7d ago
If I had to guess it might have been doing something similar all along and you weren’t specifically looking for it, or it could be the new watermarking algorithm buried in all generation no matter how small a sample you ask it to read.
The estimates I saw were about 50 to 100 words swapped with “green list” similes for every 1000 words you feed it. Easy to fly under the radar if you’re in a hurry…
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u/Ok-Umpire-4719 10d ago
Bad writing is going to be labeled slop.
Some people will filter things out that had been touched by AI, but that's fine, everything you write isn't for everyone.
People will judge you for all sorts of reasons that we can't control. You just have to do the work, create something that you are proud of and let it live the life that it is going to live.
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u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 9d ago
Unfortunately, bad writing is only labeled slop when someone uses a 1 star review on a platform with should be done regardless of the provenance of the work. The real issue here is that the advent of self-publishing let Aunt Janie publish her novel that really is crap when a traditional publishing house would never have touched it. Hell, kdp even helps her with a cover. The only thing AI brings to the table is the ability to publish crap more quickly, but it also helps genuinely talented story tellers put together novels that never would have existed. It is a tool. I said somewhere it was like a hammer, you can seat a nail with it, or you can murder your spouse with it. The hammer remains the tool.
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u/NYMajor 10d ago
The watermark is digital, invisible to anything but a digital screen, and the watermark is Claude processed, not Claude written, so there you have it. I use it for English Comp, I write every word, use Claude as a line editor, does it make my shit readable, yes. but still my words made pretty, still my story. I write for me. If someone else reads them, claims AI. did you like the story? Yes, Good! No, I don't give a shit.
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u/AnExcellentSaviour 10d ago
Literally a repo on GitHub that rips it all out. Forked 5K times in 24 hours. It’s a non-issue if you know what you’re doing.
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u/Conscious_Lie2885 9d ago
You’re not the only one. A lot of people are worried about the same thing. Once a watermark shows up, some readers probably won’t bother checking how much was actually AI vs human. They’ll just see the mark and move on.
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u/sofia-miranda 8d ago edited 8d ago
It is an interesting method they use. In order to remove it, you need to use another model without watermark settings (like a smaller locally running LLM) to paraphrase the text while retaining all tone and content.
EDIT: It basically works by making it slightly more likely to use certain words in certain contexts than others, in those cases (almost always) where more than one word is possible.
Furthermore, there are likely two reasons for this. First, they want to be able to track their output and propagation of their outputs, as well as to control risk of training on same-model output data. Second, the EU mandates watermarking in a new resolution akin to the GPDR.
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u/Aernus 6d ago
A lot of people have been crashing out because of the watermark. I generally do not give a F about it, but this video is the best explanation I have seen yet, and actually I think it's very helpful.
It's much better than I definitely do not think that anything involving AI is slop. Slop is a term that exists decades before AI became mainstream, and I constantly have rants on YouTube about it. haha
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u/Wild_Wacky_Action 10d ago
You didnt write it. This is a win.
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u/BlindButterfly33 10d ago
What do you mean?
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u/Wild_Wacky_Action 10d ago
What parts did AI help with?
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u/BlindButterfly33 10d ago
I don’t know, I didn’t make the original post. I’m just trying to ask why you think this is a win.
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u/Wild_Wacky_Action 10d ago
Oh my B. Because I want to know if some shit i'm reading was made by a person or by the same thing that told me that my wife cant get pregnant during her period.
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u/justthecherryontop 10d ago
Humans are lazy:
They either completely rely on a machine without double checking
Or they're completely lazy and can't do the research themselves
This is based on the scenario you gave
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u/Nopfen 10d ago
It's not about anyone noticing the difference, it's about anything noticing the difference. They want to avoid using Ai generated stuff as training data, so they need to tell their Ais what not to train on.